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LIFE, CHARACTER, 



PUBLIC SERVICES 



OF 



General George B. MgClellan, 



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DELIVERED DECEMBER 4, 1886, AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC 

IN PHILADELPHIA, AT THE REQUEST 

OF THE 



McCLELLAN MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION, 

OF PHILADELPHIA, 



BY 

GEORGE TICKNOR CURTIS. 



BOSTON: 

CUPPLES, UPHAM AND COMPANY, 

Zljt (dm Corner iSoofestore. 
1887. 




Class. . £ ■* v:> 7 
CopightS?. 



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CDPXRIGHT DEPOSHi 






1 

LIFE, CHARACTER, 

AND 

PUBLIC SERVICES 

OF 

General George B. MgGlellm. ^ 

DELIVERED DECEMBER 4, 1886, AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIG 

IN PHILADELPHIA, AT THE REQUEST 

OF THE 

McCLELLAN MEMORIAL ASSOCIATIOISr, 

OF PHILADELPHIA, 

BY ^ • 

GEORGE TICKNOR CURTIS. 

M 




BOSTON: 
CUPPLES, UPHAM AND COMPANY, 

^fje ®IU Corner Baafestore. 
1887. 



t^^'1 



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Philadelphia, Oct. 22, 1886, 
Hon. George Ticknor Curtis. 

Dear Sir, — It having been determined to have delivered, for the 
benefit of the McClellan Monument Fund, an address upon the life, 
character, and public services of General George B. McClellan, under 
the auspices of the McClellan Memorial Association, the undersigned 
have been requested to invite you to deliver the same at the Academy of 
Music, at such time as may be convenient to you. Your familiarity with 
and close study of the subject have prompted the Association to select 
you as pre-eminently qualified for this important task. 
With great respect, 

W. V. McKean, 
A. K. McClure, 
Charles Emory Smith, 
William M. Singerly, 
Jno. Wanamaker, 
M. P. Handy, 
John Y. Huber, 
M. Veale, 
Charles A. Lagen. 



Washington, D.C, Oct. 25, 1886. 
Messrs. W. V. McKean, A. K. McClure, Charles Emory Smith, 

and others. 

Gentlemen, — I have received your letter inviting me to deliver 
in Philadelphia an address on the life, character, and public services 
of General George B. McClellan, at such time as may suit my con- 
venience. I am much occupied at this season with professional engage 
ments; — btit as General McClellan was a very dear and intimato 
friend of mine for more than twenty years ; as his character was one 
most unique and remarkable ; and as his services to our common country 
in its darkest hour were of unsurpassed importance, — T cannot decline 
to do anything in my power that may aid in the right appreciation of 
his character, and the perpetuation of his fame. 

I shall hold myself in readiness to discharge the duty which you have 
assigned to me, on the evening of Saturday, December 4. 
I am very respectfully and truly yours, 

George Ticknor Curtis. 



ADDRESS, 



Monumental commemoration of the distin- 
guished dead has been in all the ages of civilization 
the durable sign by which a contemporary generation 
has sought to transmit its estimate of high character 
to the recognition of posterity. The marble and 
the bronze^ whether shaft or statue, tablet or in- 
scription, preceded printed records of noble lives; 
and even now they answer a purpose which biogra- 
phies or histories cannot answer. They speak as 
books cannot speak, for they speak to multitudes 
whom books do not reach, even in an age of reading 
and among a nation of readers. 

There have been three epochs in this our America, 
when there have arisen many eminent men whose 
memories we have perpetuated by structures de- 
signed to stand as lasting visible tokens of our 
admiration and of our gratitude for lives of tran- 
scendent importance. One of these epochs was that 
of our Revolution, which produced more illustrious 
statesmen than great soldiers. The next age was 
marked by few extraordinary achievements in war, 

5 



but it brougM forth, statesmen of imimperisliable 
renown, jurists of the highest rank, and inventors 
whose productions have carried forward the mate- 
rial condition of the world by enormous strides. 
The third period is that of our civil war, which 
developed few very eminent statesmen, but it gave 
rise to a larger number of great soldiers than any 
other period in modern times, save that which 
comprehended the European wars that followed 
and were caused by the French Revolution. 

Perhaps the reason, or one reason, why our civil 
war was more prolific in the highest form of the 
military than the civil character, was because, from 
the long pending discussion of the public question 
that was finally put to the arbitrament of arms, there 
was but little to be discovered and made operative 
by the genius of the statesman. The principles that 
lay at the basis of the whole civil controversy had 
been explored, enunciated, and made into a definite 
issue by the intellects of the civilians who preceded 
the resort to arms between the two sections into 
which our Union unhappily became divided. As 
representative minds, teaching opposite doctrines 
concerning the nature of our Constitution, Webster 
and Calhoun stand, and will always stand, as the 
two statesmen who gave form and substance 
to the opposite sides of the national debate. They 



left little of argument or reasoning to be added by 
those who were to come after them ; and when at 
length it became necessary for the Federal Govern- 
ment to defend and assert its proper authority by 
physical force, and the revolting states and their 
people believed it to be necessary to the protection 
of their rights and interests to establish an inde- 
pendent confederacy, the chief field for statesman- 
ship was a field of administration in assertion of the 
political doctrines which the two sections had 
respectively embraced. But in the military contest 
there was a different field — a field for the develop- 
ment of whatever genius for war the people of either 
section possessed. The contest became one of 
stupendous proportions before the civil rulers or the 
people on either side were aware of what it was to 
be. In any such war there must arise generals of 
the highest grade ; for it is only men of great mili- 
tary capacity who can lead and handle armies of 
such magnitude as those which encountered each 
other in this war — a war waged over a country of 
vast extent, and waged between forces animated by 
an equal determination to win final victory. 

He of whom I am to speak to you to-night was 
at one time in this terrible contest the central mili- 
tary figure on the Union side. I shall not say of 
him that he was the greatest general of the whole 



8 

war. It is enough for the glory of McClellan^ 
enough for the place that he is to occupy in history^ 
enough for the instruction of posterity, to describe 
truly what he was, how he came to be what he was, 
and what we owe to him; to relate the obstacles 
which he had to encounter in the conduct of the 
government that he served ; what were the qualities' 
that enabled him to do what he did in spite of the 
enmity of open enemies and the treachery of pre- 
tended friends. Other men, if placed in the same 
situation, might have done more or might have done 
less. No other general ivas placed in the same- 
situation. "We are concerned here with what 
McClellan did, and not with what some other 
general might have done ; with his abilities, his 
motives, his principles, and his conduct ; with all 
that made up his individuality, and made him, in 
the sum total of his character, a most definite, 
imique, and memorable person. 

In the course of nature he should have dropped 
a tear over my grave, if haply there might be any- 
thing in me to call for such a tribute from him. I 
was by many years his senior in age ; but I knew 
and loved him, and have survived him ; knew him 
in the intimacy of close friendship ; loved him as I 
have never loved any other man who was not of my 
own blood. I have obeyed your summons to speak 



of him because I felt qualified for the duty, and 
because those who had a right to be consulted have 
approved your choice and lent me their aid. 

It is now a little more than a year since his mortal 
remains were laid in a grave that overlooks the 
Delaware at the capital of his adopted State. The 
thousands who there in mute reverence witnessed 
the grand simplicity of his burial — so appropriate 
to his unostentatious life — knew that their genera- 
tion had never been called to mourn a public man 
of greater virtues and greater worth than his. They 
knew that in his whole life there had never been an 
act or an utterance that should give a pang to those 
who loved him; that there was nothing to be ex- 
plained, extenuated, or accounted for by casuistry, 
sound or unsou.nd; that he was noble, unselfish, 
devoted to duty, rich in all the graces of the 
Christian character, to a degree beyond the ordinary 
measure of human goodness. They knew that there 
w as a winning charm in his personal presence rarely 
to be met, and felt alike by all — a charm that 
was unstudied, the natural expression of a frank, 
true, and guileless nature. 

In the course of a long life and of much inter- 
course with men of mark, I have never known 
anything like the influence of McClellan's aspect 
and demeanor. It has been said of him, by one who 



10 

knew him as I did, that his presence was a bene- 
diction. It was so from his youth. In his mature 
yearSj and after fame had become associated in our 
minds with his image, he was ever the same simple, 
well poised, unaffected person, around whom there 
was an atmosphere of truth, intelligence, and good- 
ness, that one drank with ever increasing satisfac- 
tion. It was an atmosphere for which I know of 
no better epithet than ivJioIesome, for it was unal- 
loyed by the least taint of anything that was 
morally unhealthy. To breathe it was like breath- 
ing the air of an elevated region, where the sweet- 
ness of flowers mingles with the purest ingredients 
of the element that sustains our lives. That such 
a moral atmosphere should have surrounded a 
soldier, and a man who lived habitually in contact 
with the world, if no miracle, is at least worthy of 
distinct recognition. So happily compounded was 
his character, so completely did the outer man ex- 
press the inner attributes of a kindly, sincere, and 
attractive soul, that the influence of his personal 
presence was the same upon those whom the world 
would call his social equals and those who could 
have known him only as one who stood above thein, 
but was yet very near and dear to them. Those 
who stood upon the same social plane, as we some- 
times account such distinctions, could enjoy the 



11 

nnboiiglit grace of such, a character, and could 
analyze it if they were disposed. Others felt it 
without analysis, but with just as sure a perception 
of a rare and beautiful nature. I must give you a 
few anecdotes that will illustrate this peculiarity 
of the man : 

One summer's afternoon, a couple of years before 
his death, I sate conversing with him on the ve- 
randa of a hotel at a fashionable watering-place. 
There were none of the other guests very near to 
us. I heard a step behind us, as of a person 
approaching slowly and doubtful of farther advance. 
I turned and saw a tall man in rustic garb looking 
most intently at the General. Supposing that he 
was some countryman who wanted an introduction, 
I rose and stepped towards him. '^ Sir," he whis- 
pered, '' I have come a long way from my home to 
see General McClellan — I fought under him at 
Antietam — do you think he would speak with 
me?" I need not tell you what greeting this 
soldier received \ but his eyes filled with tears as the 
General told him that he remembered how his regi- 
ment obeyed, in the flame and crash of the battle, and 
amid whizzing bullets and bursting shells, an order 
that had been given to advance and drive back a 
portion of the enemy from a certain position. "And 
you were in that charge ? " said the General. " God 



12 

bless yoLi ! There was many a poor fellow fell in 
your ranks ] but they did not die in vain ; and you, 
comrade, have not lived in vain." There was much- 
other discourse ; sweet, tender, filled with memo- 
ries of a terrible but glorious day. This man had 
never seen the beloved commander since his final 
displacement from the head of the noble Army of 
the Potomac until that moment. Twenty years 
had rolled by in the peaceful, uneventful subsequent 
life of this soldier ; and now there beamed upon 
him once more that genial smile — once more, and 
as it proved, for the last time on earth he stood 
face to face with the General, whose tender care for 
the lives of his men they knew was the secret of 
that extraordinary power by which he could, when 
it became necessary, hurl them into the jaws of 
death. This power of McClellan over the soldiers 
whom he commanded, although a personal gift, 
was also a public property of the utmost value to 
the government and the country that he served ; 
and I must tell you how it was recklessly and 
needlessly lost to the public service by those who 
should have carefully husbanded and used it. 

In the autumn of 1884, General McClellan was 
invited to be present, in the city of Eochester, at a 
public parade of the " Grand Army of the Eepublic " 
in that part of the State of New York. On the 



13 

announcement that he was coming, the resident 
population of the city was swelled, on the day of 
the procession, by forty thousand people from the 
surrounding counties. They came from the broad, 
rich plains of Geneseo, from the shores of Ontario, 
and from the regions where the upper waters of the 
Genesee Eiver, one of the tributaries of your own 
Susquehanna, pour themselves down to the wheels 
of industry in a thriving and energetic community. 
Schools of learning, the teachers and pupils of a 
university, the instructed and cultivated of a re- 
fined and educated people of both sexes, mingled in 
the throng of artisans, farmers, merchants, laborers 
— the components of our best civilization. As the 
procession advanced along its line of march, an 
excited crowd insisted on uncoupling the horses 
from the carriage in which McClellan was seated, 
and on dragging it by their own stalwart arms. 
This he would not permit, although it was with 
difficulty prevented. Along the whole route the 
joy, the manifestations of delight, the eagerness to 
see him and to grasp his hand, were unprecedented. 
No other man in America could have called forth 
such an homage from such a people by his mere 
presence. He had no official position, and was .not 
likely to have any. In all that vast crowd there 
was not a person on whom he could bestow any- 



14 

tiling but a friendly smikj a kind word, and a 
pressure of the hand. This homage came from the 
hearts of men, to one who they all knew had never 
received from his country the meed that should 
have been paid to great services and unsurpassed 
personal worth. It was all that they could give — 
a spontaneous outburst of affection from a generous, 
just, and most intelligent people. 

One other story and I pass on. In the spring of 
1884, General McClellan had occasion to visit a 
remote part of Texas to explore some mineral lands. 
He and his party of engineers and laborers found 
themselves one day in a frontier town, at the end 
of railway travel in that direction. The inhabit- 
ants insisted on giving him a public reception in 
their town hall before they would allow him to 
continue his journey, the remainder of which was 
to be made 5n horseback. They crowded into the 
little building. Among them were men who had 
fought in the civil war on opposite sides. Union 
soldiers and Confederate soldiers, old and young, 
men of northern and men of southern birth, men 
of all shades of political feeling, pressed around 
him, paid their tribute .to his character, and 
evinced their knowledge of his peculiar reputation. 
So it was everywhere, at all times, wherever 
he appeared in the broad domain of this Republic, 



15 



among people to whom he was in one sense a 



jtranger. 



I have heard it remarked by an intelligent man 
who served, and served well, in the rank and file of 
the Union armies, that the attention which we have 
bestowed upon the careers of our most distinguished 
generals, and our jealousy of their respective repu- 
tations, indicate some indifference to the claims of 
the common soldiers, who risked as much as and 
more than their commanders, but whose lives were 
the counters with which ambitious heroes played 
for the stake of personal glory. If this complaint 
is in any case just, I take it upon me to say, con- 
cerning McClellan, that one of the most prominent 
and important of the traits of his military character 
was his conscientious care for the men who com- 
posed the armies that he commanded. To him they 
were no counters in a game for his own distinction. 
They were the precious lives entrusted to him by 
Providence for the most important public purpose 
that a government and people ever undertook. 

The tenderness of McClellan' s nature was by no 
means unbraced by the robust qualities of which so 
much account is made in our estimates of military 
men. The sternness with which he could repress 
disorder and punish mutinous conduct was exhib- 
ited more than once in the most remarkable man- 



16 

ner. Of personal courage he often gave proof on 
the field of battle, when it was necessary and right 
for a commanding general to expose his own life ; 
nor do I know that his courage was ever questioned. 
But detraction has long been busy with the impu- 
tation that, although he was a very accomplished 
man in some parts of the art of war, yet, as a gen- 
eral in the field, he lacked vigor, decision, prompt- 
ness, the quick, resolute action by which a blow 
well struck is followed at once into the gain of 
farther advantages. It was said that he was con- 
stitutionally " slow," that he was always calling 
for re-enforcements, was never ready to act until he 
had accumulated every possible resource, and that 
he thus suffered the opportune moment to go by. 
This was especially the criticism that, with some 
honesty in a few and with great dishonesty in 
others, was applied to him after the battle of 
Antietam. It will be my duty to show you that 
this is entirely false. A man who could take a 
demoralized army, as McClellan took the combined 
forces that had been defeated under Pope in front 
of Washington at the second Bull Run, restore its 
discipline by the magic of his name and his swift 
reconstruction of its shattered organizations, and 
then lead it to victory within fourteen days, after 
an almost imexampled celerity of movement against 



. 17 

the enemy who had crushed it two weeks before 
and had then gone sixty miles to the north-west 
with a purpose to descend upon the capital on the 
other side of the Potomac — such a man is not to 
be spoken of or thought of as wanting in the force 
and vigor of a great general. 

But I am anticipating, and perhaps I am violat- 
ing the rules of art in the construction of this dis- 
course ; yet I doubt if all the rules of rhetorical 
composition that were ever taught in the schools 
will help me to reach the feelings and convictions 
of this audience better than the free flow of my 
thoughts as they well up from their fountains and 
spread themselves over my page. I am saddened 
by the memory that this dear friend is no more. 
Where are you ? I cry out to him in my loneliness 
— Where in the universe is now your gracious 
spirit ? Faith answers that he is in the great com- 
pany of those who did manfully the work assigned 
to them on earth. My heart was just now in that 
grave at Trenton. I recall it that I may give 
you in brief a narrative of his life, may show you 
how you should appreciate his character, and why 
you should perpetuate his fame. In what remains 
of this address there shall be method, and the due 
order that you have a right to expect. 

In describing McClellan's campaigns, his organ- 



18 

ization of the Army of the Potomac, his plans for 
the entire conduct of the war, and his services in 
twice saving the Capital, I shall state results and 
conclusions only, to which the historical materials 
now enable us to arrive ; and I shall refer you, for 
the proof of my positions, chiefly to the work that- 
has just been published under the title of "Mc- 
Clellan's Own Story," which was written by him 
during the last years of his life, and was left by 
him for such use as his literary executor might see 
fit to make of it. You will notice that this record 
is illustrated by the editor with many extracts 
from General McClellan's letters to his wife, to 
whom, whatever might have been the duty of the 
day, marching or fighting, or ofiice work, he wrote 
every night of his life when he was away from her, 
before he closed or attempted to close his eyes. 
No more remarkable collection of letters has ever 
been given to the world. They reveal the man's 
inner soul, so that you can know his motives, his 
feelings, his purposes, the springs of his conduct, 
his relations with other men, how they affected 
him and affected the country, as well as if you 
stood constantly by his side and could look 
directly into his mind and heart. One part of the 
duty which has been assigned to me on this occa- 
sion is to speak of McClellan's character. You 



19 

can learn it for yourselves without any aid from 
me, by following him from day to day, and from 
night to night, through the outpouring of his in- 
most thoughts to the person with whom he stood 
in the most intimate relation of life ; the yoimg 
wife to whom he had been but recently married, 
whom, with her lately born infant, he had been 
obliged to leave at the call of his country, and 
who, herself the daughter of a soldier, was a 
woman worthy in heart and intellect of such a 
husband. She is now, in her widowhood, an object 
of interest and veneration to such multitudes of 
people that I could not avoid pointing you to the 
sources from which you may learn how he un- 
bosomed himself to her who could best understand 
him. 

I may remark, in reference to the materials ta 
which I have referred, that I, like many others 
who are here present, belong to the generation of 
those who lived through the whole of our civil 
troubles, and the war which ensued from them; 
and that I was a close observer, from day to day, 
of all that was taking place and that " could be- 
come known to a private citizen. But I am now 
speaking to many who were children at the time 
of these events, or perhaps were then unborn. 
They will understand that; while my memory 



20 

runs concurrently with the events themselves, I 
shall make no assertions that are not substantiated 
by the truth of history. 

I must give you, in the briefest possible space, a 
resume of the condition of the country just preced- 
ing the commencement of actual hostilities. I 
dislike to use the terms North and South — they 
ought, by this time, to be laid aside; but there 
are no others that will conveniently stand for 
the States which adhered to the Federal Govern- 
ment and the States which undertook to secede 
from the Union. In 1860 the Free States, col- 
lectively styled the North, elected a President of 
the United States on an issue relating to slavery 
in the Territories. It does not belong to this 
occasion to speak of the wisdom or the want of 
wisdom in tendering to the South, or in accepting 
from the South, an issue on any question relating 
to slavery; nor is it now needful to trace the 
causes which led to the adoption, in the North and 
the South, respectively, of political "platforms" 
entirelv irreconcilable. The election of a President 
by the vot'es of the Free States alone, on a plat- 
form to which the people of the South could not 
assent, was made by the Southern States their 
reason for endeavoring to leave the Union. 

Immediately after the election of President 



21 

Lincoln, South Carolina, in December, 1860, 
passed her ordinance of secession from the Union. 
This was followed by the same proceeding in the 
five States of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, 
Louisiana, and Florida ; so that before the 4th of 
February, 1861, six of the Southern States had 
adopted ordinances of secession ; and on the 8th of 
February deputies from these States had adopted 
and published at Montgomery, in Alabama, a 
provisional constitution for the so-called Confeder- 
ate States. 

McClellan, who was at the age of thirty-five in 
the autumn of 1860, had been for about four years 
in civil life : first as chief engineer, afterward as 
Vice-President of the Illinois Central Railroad, 
and later as President of the Eastern Division of 
the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad. His last com- 
mission in the army was that of a captain of 
cavalry, which he resigned in January, 1857. His 
residence was in Cincinnati. So thoroughly con- 
vinced was he, in the autumn of 1860, that war 
would ensue between the North and the South, 
that, in a lease which he then took of a house in 
that city, he required the insertion of a clause re- 
leasing him from the obligation in the event of 
war. He chose to put himself in a position in 
which he could render to his country the services 



22 

for whicli lie was qualified. There are two ways 
of looking at his conduct : One is to apply to it 
the superficial suggestion that it was dictated by 
ambition -, the other is to recognize the fact that 
the man of whom I am speaking was no common 
person, and to look for those elements of char- 
acter which in him rose far above the ordinary 
level. Mercenary motives are not to be imputed 
to a man who surrendered a salary of $10,000 
per annum and took the precarious chances of mili- 
tary employment ; and as to motives of ambition, 
we must look through all the facts before we draw 
such an inference. 

The first thing to be noticed in our analysis of 
McClellan's character is his political opinions. I 
use the term political not in a party sense at all, 
but in its broadest acceptation, and perhaps I 
should say that I speak of his constitutional opin- 
ions. I have elsewhere said that " I have not 
known any man who was not specially trained in 
the philosophy of politics, whose views of pubHc 
and constitutional questions were so sound and 
wise as his." Of course I meant to compare him 
with that order of men who have made political 
science the study of their lives, and not to inti- 
mate that McClellan, without study and research, 
had intuitively arrived at sound constitutional 



23 

opinions. I meant to say that McClellan, although 
educated as a military man, was a better instructed 
constitutionalist than any other man whom I have 
known who was not a statesman or publicist by 
special training or employment. I was very much 
impressed by this when I first met him in the 
autumn of 1862, after his forced retirement from 
the command of the Army of the Potomac. I 
had not seen him since the year 1842, when he 
graduated from West Point. When I renewed 
my acquaintance with him after a lapse of twenty 
years, I found him to be singularly alive to all 
the dangers that then threatened the Constitution 
of the United States. You, who cannot personally 
recall the currents of opinion and feeling at that 
time, can have little conception of the perils 
through which the Constitution passed. The suc- 
cessful assertion of the right of State secession 
from the Union was by no means the sole danger. 
Multitudes of men throughout the North, many of 
them in high public positions, were speaking of 
the Constitution as if it had been suspended from 
its office ; and whether it was ever to be restored 
to its functions they considered doubtful. Care- 
lessly and heedlessly tempting the future, they 
treated the Constitution as something that had 
been put aside to await the advent of some new 



24 

authority, which was to grasp and wield unknown 
powers through a military conquest of the South- 
ern States and a suppression of their au.tonomy. 
This dangerous drift of public sentiment McClellan 
thoroughly comprehended and feared. He spoke 
of it with me repeatedly, as the greatest peril 
of the time, in words so solemn, earnest, and 
true, that from that time forward I felt how 
fortunate it was that this man, of such great, 
military accomplishments, was a better instructed 
constitutional statesman than nine-tenths of 
the public men of the time in either political 
party. 

But I specially wish now to adduce a remarka- 
ble proof that my estimate of this part of 
McClellan' s character is correct. I find in the 
introductory chapter of his lately published 
Memoirs the following short paragraphs : 

. . . '^ In a country so vast as ours, with. such, great 
differences of topography and of climate, with a population 
so numerous and derived from such a variety of sources, and, 
in consequence of all this, such diversities of habits, local 
laws, and material interests, it is impossible for a centralized 
government to legislate satisfactorily for all the domestic- 
concerns of the various parts of the Union. 

" The only safe policy is that the general Government be 
strictly confined to the general powers and duties vested in 
it by the old Constitution, while the individual States pre- 



25 

serve all the sovereign riglits and powers retained by them 
when the constitutional compact was formed. 

"As a corollary from this, I am convinced that no State 
can be deprived of any of these retained rights, powers, and 
duties without its own consent, and that the power of amend- 
ing the Constitution was intended to apply ouly to 
amendments affecting the manner of carrying into effect the 
original provisions of the Constitution, but not to enable the 
general Government to seize new power at the expense of 
any unwilling State. 

" A strict adherence in practice to this theory presents, 
in my opinion, the only possibility of the permanent main- 
tenance of our Union throughout the long years of the 
future." 

I have been for more than forty years, as you 
perhaps know, a student of the Constitution, 
its history, the lives, purposes, and teachings of 
its framers, and the whole course of its ad- 
ministration, and I do not hesitate to say that 
in my judgment McClellan's understanding of the 
scope and purpose of the amending power was en- 
tirely correct.. It is a doctrine of which few 
persons have ever thought, but a volume could be 
written in its defence. McClellan stated it with a 
clearness of apprehension and a lucid exactness of 
language, tersely and precisely, just as it should 
be expressed. He was entirely right in saying 
that the permanent maintenance of our Union 
throughout the long years of the future depends 



26 

upon this doctrine. Whenever it is departed 
from our constitutional system will be overthrown, 
and after that will come the deluge. 

Next you will observe McClellan's military 
qualifications for the great place to which he was 
called. They comprehended a greater variety of 
experience, observation, and acquired knowledge 
than was possessed at that moment by any other 
man in America on the Union side ; and added to 
these was the very important qualification of 
great personal strength and physical' power of 
endurance. His labors of all kinds, so long as he 
served during the Civil War, were immense ; and 
he often tired out the strongest and hardiest of his 
staff. Beginning with his West Point education, 
and his service in the Mexican war, we find that 
in these respects he stood upon a par with many 
other officers of the regular army ; but we have to 
fill out a most comprehensive outline of subse- 
quent experience and acquisition, for his opportu- 
nities of accomplishing himself in every branch of 
the profession of arms were certainly not sur- 
passed, if they were equalled, by those enjoyed by 
any other officer in this country. At the close of 
the Mexican war he commanded the engineer com- 
pany and brought it to West Point, where he con- 
tinued to serve with it, and, until 1851, he also 



27 

gave instruction in practical engineering. In the 
latter year, he superintended the construction of 
Fort Delaware. In 1852 he served with Capt. R. 
B. Marcy on the Eed River exploration. In 1853 
and 1854 he was sent to Washington Territory 
and Oregon, as an engineer officer, to explore a 
route for the Pacific Railroad. 

In the spring of 1855, Mr. Jefferson Davis, who 
was then Secretary of War, sent a commission of 
officers to Europe, composed of Major R. Delafield, 
Major A. Mordecai, and Captain McClellan, to 
ohtain and report information on military service 
in general, and the recent improvements in the 
various military systems. The scope of this com- 
mission comprehended the whole of the modern 
art of war in all its details. The Crimean war 
was then in progress, and the allied British and 
French forces were besieging Sebastopol. The 
French and the Russian authorities extended no 
special courtesies to our commissioners, but they 
received every attention from the English com- 
mander. General Simpson, the successor of Lord 
Raglan. They spent the summer in the Crimea, 
studying the operations of war on the grand scale 
on which they were there conducted. In Novem- 
ber they left the Crimea, ar.d were occupied for 
some months in visiting the most important mill- 



28 

tary posts and fortresses in Europe. McClellan's 
part in this comprehensive survey of military 
affairs was embodied in a special report, which 
was first published by the Government in a rather 
inconvenient quarto form, and it remained for 
some time but little known, excepting to military 
men. But in October, 1861, after he had been 
called to Washington, an edition of it was brought 
out by the house of Lippincott & Co., in this city, 
under the title of " The Armies of Europe." The 
public were thus enabled to learn McClellan's 
extensive and minute knowledge of the art of war 
in all its multifarious details ; and there is no art 
or science known and practised among men the 
full mastery of which includes so much. In the 
legal profession, long experience and training 
enable men, by special study of any subject, to 
deal with it for the purposes of the administration 
of justice in particular cases. But in the military 
profession there can be no special study for special 
occasions ; no sudden investigation to learn what 
to do on the eve of this battle or in that move- 
ment. A great general must be an accomplished 
engineer, an organizer, an artillery, a cavalry, and 
an infantry officer ; he must know many sciences 
and many arts ; he must be acquainted with the 
topography of the country in which he is to act ; 



29 

he must know men^ and must be able to govern 
them; he must have all his knowledge at com- 
mand and at all times ; and, although he must use 
subalterns of various ranks as his agents, he must 
be able to choose and to direct them. When 
McClellan surrendered his civil employment as 
President of the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad, and 
drew his sword for the Union, he was by far the 
most accomplished military man in the whole 
North. He had travelled much — a great deal 
throughout the Union — and his experience as a 
railway manager had also given him a great 
amount of topographical and geographical knowl- 
edge. 

I must pass rapidly over his Western campaign, 
before he was called to Washington, because I 
must make this whole narrative of his previous 
career converge to the point of his arrival in the 
capital of the Union, as the point at which we 
are to take him up, on the great national theatre 
of the war. It is enough to say here that, at the 
special instance of the Governor of Ohio, Gov- 
ernor Dennison, the Legislature of that State, on 
the 23d of April, 1861, passed a bill which enabled 
the Governor to appoint McClellan to the com- 
mand of all the militia and volunteers of Ohio 
that were to be called out in defence of the Union. 



30 

McClellan accepted the appointment on the same 
day. This was jnst nine days after the bombard- 
ment of Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, 
by the Confederate forces, had compelled Major 
Anderson to surrender that fort. The attack on 
the national flag roused the whole North to a sense 
that there was to be war. In Cincinnati, and all 
along the Ohio river, intense excitement prevailed ; 
the formation of regiments began immediately. 
But the authorities in Washington left almost 
everything in the West to the loyal State govern- 
ments and people in that region. Ohio was pecul- 
iarly situated. South of her, separated only by 
the Ohio river, lay Kentucky, and the attitude of 
that State was very doubtful. Missouri was likely 
to be the scene of a serious struggle. Secession 
forces were gathering in Tennessee and upon the 
Mississippi River, and also in Western Virginia, 
which was not then a separate State by itself. In 
Illinois, Indiana, and to some extent in Ohio, num- 
bers of the inhabitants were, or were believed to 
be, in sympathy with the Southern cause. It was 
very plain to McClellan that all this must be 
promptly checked. But the general Government 
were wholly unprepared for war in the West or 
in the East. Beauregard was rapidly advancing 
through North Carolina mto Virginia, and the 



31 

Confederate government were preparing to make 
Eichmond their capital. " The Western States," 
McClellan says in his memoirs, " were almost en- 
tirely without the means of defence, but the Gov- 
ernors (cordially supported by the legislatures) at 
once took steps to obtain by purchase and by con- 
tract, at home and abroad, the requisite arms, 
ammunition, clothing, camp equipage, etc. The 
supplies thus provided were often inferior in 
quahty and insufficient in quantity, but they an- 
swered the purpose until better arrangements could 
be made." 

The general Government had called for 75,000 
volunteers to be mustered into its service for three 
months. Ohio's quota of these new levies, the 
three-months' men, together with twelve or thir- 
teen regiments of the Ohio State troops, consti- 
tuted the forces of which McClellan took the 
command; and he immediately proceeded to the 
work of organization and discijDline. Almost all 
that was done by the Administration at Washing- 
ton was that on the loth of May, 1861, an order 
was issued constituting the Department of Ohio, 
namely, the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, 
and assigning McClellan to the command as major- 
general. Afterward, a small part of Western 
Pennsylvania and that part of Western Virginia 



32 

north of the Great Kanawha and west of the 
Greenbriar rivers was added to his Department. 
He was left without a single instructed staff officer, 
and was obliged to supply that deficiency as well 
as he could. For a long time General Scott, the 
general-in-chief, and the other military authorities 
in Washington, would not allow him to organize 
cavalry and artillery for his command, because 
they considered it unnecessary. No battery in the 
United States service was at his disposal excepting 
one that was authorized by General Wool when 
communication with Washington was cut off. Up- 
on McClellan's recommendation the Governors of 
the States organized State batteries on their own 
responsibility. 

It is worth while to fix our attention for a mo- 
ment on this state of affairs, because it illustrates 
most forcibly how totally unprepared* for war the 
Federal Government was; and it also illustrates 
the wisdom of McClellan's remark that, in the 
complete capacity of the States, by reason of their 
political sovereignties, to act on their own respon- 
sibility in aid of the Federal power during a great 
emergency, lies one of the chief values of our 
political system. It was by the exercise of these 
powers that the Western States enabled McClellan 
to achieve the first successes of the war. 



83 

Those successes were achieved in one month, 
between the 21st of June and the 21st of July. 
Let any one who has heard the slur of /^slow- 
ness " hurled at McClellan fix his attention upon 
the fact that, left entirely to himself, save in the 
support which he received from the Western gov- 
ernments, in one month he cleared the secessionists 
out of "\Yestern Virginia, made all the military 
dispositions necessary to hold Kentucky and Ten- 
nessee, and to organize and occupy the mountain 
region so as to enable Union forces to move down 
the valley of the Mississippi by roads parallel with 
that stream ; a line of operations which he consid- 
ered far preferable to any movement down the 
river itself. With comparatively little loss of his 
own men, he took nine guns, twelve colors, a great 
number of prisoners, fought many engagements, 
and conquered in every one. It is true that he 
fought with raw troops against raw troops- but 
the Confederate forces were ofiicered by able men, 
and the soldiers were fairly disciplined and full of 
courage. The Union forces were as well disci- 
plined as such troops could be in so short a time, 
but they were not always so well officered as the 
Confederates. The time of the three months' men 
was about expiring, and, when he had to give up 
the command in the West, McClellan was pain- 



34 

fully occupied and embarrassed in finding out how 
to supply their places. At this moment, the pub- 
lic attention throughout the North was fixed upon 
him as the first commander who had achieved any- 
thing of importance. 

On the 21st of July, the Union forces under 
McDowell were utterly routed by the Confederates 
at Bull Run, some thirty miles from Washington. 
On the morning of that day, members of Congress 
and others had driven out from Washington in 
carriages to see what was supposed to be a mob of 
rebels thrashed by the Union troops. The "mob"' 
was commanded in person by General Beauregard^ 
an officer in every way superior to McDowell. Mr. 
Davis, the president of the Confederate govern- 
ment, was in the vicinity, attended by some of his 
ablest assistants. The civilians who had driven 
out from Washington to see a Union victory over 
a " mob " drove back in the afternoon amid the 
melee of forces retreating in the utmost confusion. 
Some of the Union soldiers in their flight threw 
away their arms, and did not stop until they 
reached their own States in the East. Washing- 
ton was in imminent peril. Something must be 
done. On the 2 2d of July McClellan received a 
despatch from the Adjutant-General stating that 
the condition of public affairs rendered necessary 



35 

his immediate presence in "Washington, and direct- 
ing; him to turn over his Western command to the 
next in rank, who happened to be General Rose- 
crans. 

I have hitherto left untouched one very inter- 
esting part of McClellan's character, because I did 
not wish to speak of it imtil I brought him upon 
the central theatre of national affairs. I refer to 
his religious convictions. Very many men be- 
lieve in a personal God, Creator and Governor of 
the universe. In McClellan this belief was ever 
present to his consciousness ; ever the controlling 
influence that governed his actions and his 
thoughts to a greater degree than in the case 
of any other man actively concerned in human 
affairs whom I have ever known or of whom 
I have read. He was called to a great duty in a 
crisis of his country, and from first to last, every 
day and every hour, he was under the influence of 
a belief that Divine Providence was shaping every 
event and overruling every occurrence for the pur- 
poses of infinite wisdom. Yet in all this there 
was not the least tinge of what is sometimes called 
fanaticism. It was a sober, regulated, deep con- 
viction that the affairs of this world are under 
the government of God. It was this conviction 
that enabled him to bear obloquy, and to do his 



36 

duty in spite of the injustice of which he was? 
made the victinij while^ at the same time, he nevei 
omitted, in his reliance on Heaven, to use all hu- 
man means to injure success. Writing to his 
wife from Washington, after he had received 
unbounded flattery, and had had suggested to him 
a vast temptation to which he might have easily 
yielded, with what fidelity to j)rinciple, with what 
religious humility, with what noble disdain of all 
the promptings of ambition, he speaks to her who 
shared his inmost soul, and who understood him 
as no one else could : 

I receive letter after letter, liave conversation after con- 
versation, calling on me to save tlie nation, alluding to the 
presidency, dictatorship, etc. As I hope one day to be 
united with you forever in Heaven, I have no such aspira- 
tion. I would cheerfully take the dictatorship and agree 
to lay down my life when the country is saved. I am not 
spoiled by my unexpected new ^^osition. I feel sure that 
God will give me the strength and wisdom to preserve this 
great nation ; but I tell you, who share all my thoughts, 
that I have no seliish feeling in this matter. I feel that 
God has placed a great work in my hands. I have not 
sought it. I know how weak I am, but I know that I mean 
to do right, and I believe that God will help me and give 
me the wisdom I do not possess. Pray for me, that I may 
be able to accomplish my task, the greatest perhaps that 
any poor weak mortal ever had to do. . . . God grant that 
I may bring this war to an end and be permitted to spend 
the rest of my days quietly with joii. * 

* Written on the 9tli of August, 1861. 



o< 



I must now speak of a trait in McClellan's 
character which., as Mr. Prime has suggested, 
some persons may regard as a defect. It was cer- 
tainly one that placed him at a disadvantage 
agahist the politicians who swarmed at the seat of 
government. He was so perfectly honest himself 
that he rarely suspected, could hut seldom he made 
to suspect, dishonesty in others. He had seen 
almost nothing of the interior world of politics ; 
and whsn he came to Washington into a very high 
and responsible position he did not dream of the 
existence of men whose patriotism was a pretence, 
and whose whole management of public affairs 
was for personal or party ends. Such men 
abounded, and they were potent because of their 
nmnbers and their activity. At no other period 
in our history has there been a class of public 
men of this description sufficiently strong to do 
great public mischief. They were not confined to 
one party ; they were to be found in both parties. 
To name them all would be difficult ; to name 
some of them would be easy, and it would be 
found that they were prominent ; that they bore 
names which at one time were more or less hiorh 

o 

in public estimation, but they are now lost in the 
obscurity and contempt that inevitably await the 
order to which they belonged. They cannot be 



38 

resuscitated ; they cannot be recalled without the 
derision that should follow such persons. It is 
only needful for me to say that after McClellan 
had been for some time in Washington^ he learned, 
what he had not before suspected, that there were 
men in public life who were to constitute an enemy 
in his rear, quite as formidable to him and to his 
army as the other enemy in their front. The peo- 
ple saw the enemy in the front ; the enemy in the 
rear they did not see. 

I am now to express my convictions respecting 
the relations between General McClellan and 
President Lincoln. McClellan had known Mr Lin- 
coln as a lawyer in Illinois, and also as a public 
man. He was well acquainted with Mr. Lincoln's 
habit of illustrating everything by some amusing 
story, of which he had an inexhaustible fund, and, 
as McClellan says and every one knows, Mr. Lin- 
coln's stories were not always delicate, although 
they were apposite and droll. McClellan' s esti- 
mate of Mr. Lincoln's powers as a statesman was 
not very high, before he encountered him as Presi- 
dent of the United States. Mr. Lincoln's estimate 
of McClellan, prior to their meeting in Washing- 
ton, could only have been formed from their slight 
acquaintance in the West before the war. The 
sudden peril into which Washington was brought 



39 

hj the rout of the Federal forces at Bull Eun was 
the immediate cause for summoning McClellan. 
As soon as Mr. Lincoln was brought into official 
and personal contact with him, his natural sagac- 
ity enabled him to see what McClellan was. Still, 
it requires a close analysis of Mr. Lincoln's situa- 
tion and his peculiarities, to describe truly how it 
was that, while in reality he gave his full confi- 
dence to McClellan, he often acted, or seemed to 
act, as if he reposed only a sort of half confidence 
in him, and finally allowed him to be sacrificed. 
This is not to be explained by any suggestion of 
insincerity, nor was it from any want of good-will, 
nor was it a matter for which Mr. Lincoln is to be 
severely blamed. The true explanation is that, 
while Mr. Lincoln was shrewd enough and strong 
•enough to defeat the machinations of men in his 
•own party who were inimical to himself, and to 
compel his own renomination to the Presidency, 
he was not strong enough to prevent the same 
men from destroying the General whom he had 
selected, whom he trusted, and would gladly have 
sustained. Lincoln and McClellan ought to have 
ended the war in the summer of 1862, and but for 
the politicians they would have done so. Of the 
truth of this there cannot be a shadow of doubt in 
the mind of any intelligent person who calmly 
surveys all the facts. 



40 

There was another trait of McClellan's character 
which was not only no defect, but it was one of 
the qualities most needed in the position to which 
he was summoned. His enemies and detractors 
have from that day to this harped upon his " slow- 
ness." They little knew then, and those of them 
who survive do not know now, how important to 
the public interests was that quality which he 
possessed in a most eminent degree, and which, by 
a homely but accurate phrase, Mr. Prime has de- 
scribed as his "staying" power. He could not 
always baffle the intrigues or defeat the cabals or 
unravel the plots of his enemies behind the throne. 
But neither could they drive him one inch from 
what he knew to be right, shake for one moment 
his purpose to pursue plans which he knew to be 
necessary to the safety of the country, or make 
him sacrifice his military judgment to the judg- 
ments of mere civilians, or to the schemes of poli- 
ticians. As I go on with the narrative, you will 
see how this " staying " power of McClellan — 
this calm, settled, determined purpose not to be 
driven — was the very cause whereby the military 
affairs of the Government were put into a condi- 
tion to make it possible for the Government in the 
end to succeed in the war. If the General, sup- 
posing that some one else had been put into the 



41 

place to which McClellan was called, whoever he 
might have been, had not possessed this great 
quality, if he could have been forced by public 
clamor, popular impatience, official or any other 
interference, to hazard a movement when he knew 
that the proper preparations had not been made, 
the Southern States would in all probability have 
gained their independence in the autumn of 1861, 
before the forests on the banks of the Potomac 
had shed their leaves. It is sheer folly and drivel 
for men who pretend to write history at the pres- 
ent day to be rehearsing over and over the old 
charges against McClellan, when it is apparent 
that we should not now have the country that we 
possess if he could have been forced to move one 
moment sooner than he did, or to forego the com- 
plete preparation that he made, or to omit any- 
thing for which he provided. There is a truth 
about these things ; he who runs can read it now, 
if he opens his eyes to the facts. 

We have had scores and scores of writers — per- 
haps we shall have many more — who have la- 
bored to show the extensive preparation made in 
the South for war upon the Federal Government. 
It is represented that not only was there, from an 
early period, a conspiracy to effect the disruption 
of the Union, but that the military preparations for 



42 

the accomplishment of this result were very formi- 
dable. If the facts are as they are represented, 
they constitute a most damaging indictment of 
those who could have put, but did not put, the 
Government into some condition to meet the crisis 
whenever it might come. They also furnish the 
strongest possible confirmation of the wisdom of 
McClellan's determination to leave nothing undone 
that the crisis demanded, when it had come, and 
to take all the time that was needed to do that 
which should have been done, or should at least 
have been begun, before he was called to Washing- 
ton. Now, what are the undeniable facts ? 

The election of President Lincoln in November, 
1860, left an interval of almost four months between 
that event and his inauguration, which occurred 
on the 4th of March, 1861. In this interval, and 
before the eighth day of February, six of the 
cotton States, comprehending four millions of in- 
habitants, whites and blacks, had seceded from the 
Union, and the Confederate provisional government 
had been formed. The colored race were univer- 
sally quiet, just as submissive as ever to their 
masters, perfectly willing to work in the absence of 
their owners, and as loyal as ever to the families to 
whom they belonged. The cotton crop of that 
region, averaging four million bales, would furnish 



43 

a safe basis for financial operations, almost as good 
as mines of gold. There was nothing to obstruct 
its production, or to prevent its reaching the mar- 
kets of the world, or to intercept the return of its 
proceeds in any commodities or supplies that the 
States or their inhabitants might need. Although 
before the secession of those States there was a 
Union party more or less strong in all of them, 
after secession the people were practically unani- 
mous in their determination to make good their 
independence. The slave-holding class formed a 
kind of aristocracy peculiarly well fitted to become 
efficient military officers. Two hundred and eighty- 
three men, educated at West Point, including those 
who in 1861 were in civil life, and those who were 
in the army of the United States but resigned, took 
service in the Confederate army. They were about 
one-fourth of all the West Point graduates then 
living. Some of them were men of the highest 
ability and accomplishment . The rank and file of the 
Confederate troops were sure to be composed of men 
capable in time of becoming excellent soldiers, with 
the comparatively few exceptions of the degraded 
class known in that region as "the poor whites," 
or, as the negroes styled them, "the white trash." 
All this condition of affairs in the remote South was 
known to McClellan, who had been long acquainted 



44 

with the state of Southern society; and had kept his 
eye steadily fixed on what was taking place. All 
this, toOj was known, or should have been known^ 
to those who, by the result of the Presidential elec- 
tion, had become responsible for the initiation and 
adoption of measures necessary to meet the emer- 
gency. Before the 4th of March, 1861, most of the 
Southern members of Congress had retired from 
both houses, leaving the dominant majority in both 
composed of those who Avere the political friends- 
and supporters of the incoming administration. In 
vain did the Executive Government, in that short 
period before the formal change of administration 
was to take place, urge and implore that Congress- 
to take the necessary steps to put the Government 
into a condition to meet the crisis. Nothing what- 
ever was done. When President Lincoln was 
inaugurated, he had been armed with not an iota of 
power greater than that held by his predecessor, 
and his predecessor had, but without success, done 
his utmost to have measures adopted which would 
have strengthened Mr. Lincoln's hands, and enabled 
him to cope with the rising and advancing tide of 
secession so as, at least, to hold back the border 
States from being swept along with it. Formidable 
as the cotton States were, the problem of encoun- 
tering a Southern Confederacy, of which North 



45 

Carolina and Yirginia were also to be members, 
together with Arkansas and Texas, would be, as it 
proved, one far more formidable. 

From the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln to the fall 
of Fort Sumter was a period of seven weeks. From 
the fall of Fort Sumter to the defeat of the Federal 
troops at the first Bull Eun was a period of just 
three months. In this interval Mr. Lincoln's 
proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteers to be 
enlisted for three months was issued, and it was 
followed by what has been called "the great upris- 
ing of the North." In that uprising there was a 
magnificent display of genuine patriotism ; but the 
people of the North did not comprehend the gravity 
of the situation, or foresee a great war, or feel that 
the Southern confederacy was anything but a con- 
spiracy, or the Southern forces anything but a mob 
that could easily be dispersed. This feeling was 
shared by the administration. It received a terrible 
shock at Bull Eun. There was a sudden call for 
McClellan. He came ; and he arrived in Washing- 
ton late in the afternoon of Friday the 26th of July. 
We have it on the authority of no less a person 
than Mr. Edwin M. Stanton that the administration 
and the army, such army as there was, were utterly 
demoralized by the event at Bull Eun, and that 
Washington was in imminent peril. Writing on 



46 

the 26t]i of July to ex-President Buclianaii, of 
whose cabinet he had been a member for a few 
months, Mr. Stanton uttered both history and 
prophecy. You will note that at the date of this 
letter Mr. Stanton had never seen General McClel- 
lan, and that the letter was written six months 
before Mr. Stanton became President Lincoln's 
Secretary of War : — 

"The dreadful disaster of Sunday can scarcely be men- 
tioned. The imbecility of this administration culminated 
in that catastrophe ; an irretrievable misfortune and national 
disgrace never to be forgotten are to be added to the ruin of 
all peaceful pursuits and national bankruptcy, as the result 
of Lincoln's running the machine for five months. 

" You perceive that Bennett is for a change of the Cabi- 
net; and proposes, for one of the new Cabinet, Mr. Holt, 
whose opposition to IMr. Bennett's appointment was bitter 
and intensely hostile. It is not unlikely that some change 
in the War and ]N"avy Departments may take place, but none 
beyond these two Departments until Jeff Davis turns out 
the whole concern. The capture of Washington seems now ' 
to be inevitable : during the whole of Monday and Tuesday 
it might have been taken without any resistance. The rout, 
overthrow, and utter demoralization of the whole army is 
complete. Even now I doubt whether any serions opposi- 
tion to the entrance of the Confederate forces could be 
offered. While Lincoln, Scott, and the Cabinet are disput- 
ing who is to blame, the city is unguarded, and the enemy 
at hand. Gen. McClellan reached here last evening. But 
if he had the ability of Csesar, Alexander, or Napoleon, 



47 

what can lie accomplisli ? Will not Scott's jealousy, Cabi- 
net intrigues, and Republican interference thwart him at 
every step ? While hoping for the best, I cannot shut lay 
eyes against the dangers that beset the Government, and 
especially this city. It is certain that Davis was in the 
field on Sunday, and the secessionists here assert that he 
headed in person the last victorious charge. Gen. Dix is in 
Baltimore ; after three weeks neglect and insult he was sent 
for. The warm debate between Douglass' friend Eichard- 
son and Kentucky Bennett has attracted some interest, but 
has been attended with no bellicose result. Since this note 
was commenced the morning paper has come in, and I see 
that McClellan did not arrive last night, as I was informed 
he had. Gen. Lee was after him, but will have to wait 
a while before they can meet." 

Soon after McClellan arrived in Washington, 
Mr. Stanton was introduced to him, by an old 
friend of the General, as a lawyer who would be 
a safe adviser on legal matters. McClellan was 
going into the war in which he was to stake every- 
thing, the little fortune that he had saved, perhaps 
life itself. If he fell, he would leave a wife and 
an infant child. He wished to make a will, and 
he also wished to know some lawyer who could 
give him sound advice on matters personal to him- 
self. Mr. Stanton's character has always been an 
enigma ; probably it will always remain one. I 
never saw a rational explanation of much of his 
conduct, and I never was able to discover one for 



48 

myself that would be consistent with a belief in 
his sincerity and honor. You have seen what his 
relations were to Mr. Lincoln and his advisers in 
July, '61, and what were his feelings about them. 
He at once attached himself to McClellan with 
the most profuse professions of friendship and 
personal devotion, and made known to the rela- 
tives of the General his unbounded confidence that 
McClellan would be the savior of the country. 
Apparently he thought that he could recommend 
himself to McClellan by the bitterest and most 
contemptuous expressions concerning Mr. Lincoln 
and the whole Lincoln ^' concern/' whom he pro- 
phesied that "Jeff Davis" would turn out of their 
]3laces. This became so offensive to McClellan 
that he was obliged to remind Mr. Stanton, as he 
has more than once told me, that Mr. Lincoln was 
President of the United States and Ms Com- 
mander-in-Chief. For months Mr. Stanton kept 
up his professions of devotion to the General, flat- 
tering him, as Mr. Buchanan had said he flattered 
liim, ad nauseam. When and how all this sud- 
denly ceased you will soon learn, and you will look 
for an explanation of the change. If you note 
the dates, you cannot impute the change to any 
revolution in Mr. Stanton's opinion or belief con- 
cerning the General's fitness for the great post 
which he was filling. 



49 

On the day before that on which McClellan 
reached Washington, an executive order was is- 
sued constituting the Division of the Potomac, and 
assigning him to its command. It consisted of 
that part of North-east Virginia in which Mc- 
Dowell commanded, comprising the troops in front 
of Washington, on the Virginia bank of the river, 
and the Department of Washington, under Mans- 
field, which comprised all the troops in Washing- 
ton and its vicinity on the Maryland side of the 
river. On the 27th of July McClellan assumed 
command of the Division. 

This practice of making geographical and terri- 
torial divisions or departments for military pur- 
poses, although inherited from the past, was one 
that was sure to lead to bad results. One of its 
worst results in our civil war was that it created 
opportunities for commanders and their friends to 
strive to have their commands swelled by as many 
troops as they could respectively get from the 
administration ; and as political considerations had 
a great deal to do with the assigning of some of 
the local commanders to departments, the Presi- 
dent was often led to order what he should not 
have ordered, to gratify the departmental com- 
manders, and especially those who had political 
influence. 



50 

For example, Mr. Lincoln, when McClellan was 
on the eve of advancing into Virginia in March, 
1862, withdrew from his command Blenker's Ger- 
man Division, and assigned it to General Fremont, 
who had just been placed in command of what 
was called the Mountain Department. The Presi- 
dent knew when he did this that McClellan counted 
upon that division as a necessary part of the forces 
that he was to take to the Peninsula; he had 
promised McClellan that the division should not 
be withheld from his command, and he knew that 
in every military aspect and for every military 
reason this step would be wrong. But he allowed 
it, under a political pressure, for a political pur- 
pose, as he afterward explained to McClellan in an 
apologetic note, saying : "If you could know the 
full pressure of the case, I am confident you would 
justify it, even beyond a mere acknowledgment 
that the Commander-in-Chief may order what he 
pleases." Well does McClellan say in his memoirs 
that the Commander-in-Chief has no right to do 
what he pleases ; he can properly do only what he 
is convinced is right. The President had already 
assured McClellan that he knew it would be wrong 
to issue this order, and then he admitted that he 
had issued it under a political pressure for a politi- 
cal purpose, to swell Fremont's command. This 



51 

is only one of numerous instances in which Mr. 
LincoJn acted against his own judgment in matters 
purely military for reasons purely political. 

In regard to the proper function of the Com- 
mander-in-Chief, under our Constitution, I have 
elsewhere said what seems to me to express the , 
exact truth, and I will quote it : — 

" Not to look beyond our own national annals, 
a lesson had been taught to our fathers in the case 
of the man who achieved our liberties in the War 
of the Ee volution. There was a time when the 
Continental Congress learned from sad experience 
that if Washington were not left untrammelled by \ 

cabals, were not supported with all the resources • \ 

that the country could furnish, and made free to 
act on his own judgment, the cause of our Inde- 
pendence would be lost. Our Constitution, for 
many excellent reasons, makes the President Com- 
mander-in-Chief of the armies and navies of the 
United States. He may therefore lawfully direct 
the movements of armies and of fleets ; and when 
he directs, he must be, and always is, obeyed. 
But are we never to learn that war is an art 
which, of all others, requires not only special apti- 
tude, but special training ? While no Executive 
is ever to abdicate a single one of his constitu- 
tional functions, there are and must be junctures 



52 

in every great war, especially on this continent, 
in whicli a wise President will exercise no inter- 
ference with military plans which he is not per- 
sonally competent to form, and on which liis 
judgment must necessarily be inferior to that of 
the general whom he has selected and trusted to 
conduct a campaign." * 

If this had been a war against a foreign enemy 
who was in possession of great tracts of our coun- 
try where the inhabitants were thoroughly submis- 
sive to the invaders and anxious to have them suc- 
ceed, the folly of a government that should act 
as our administration acted towards McClellan 
would have been manifest to the loyal people at the 
time. But this was a civil and not a foreign war ; 
and, therefore, in our analysis of the conduct of 
the administration towards McClellan, we must 
take into the account the situation and composi- 
tion of the executive government. 

Before McClellan arrived in Washington, there 
was not a single military man at the seat of Gov- 
ernment whose advice was of much value in 
regard to great military movements or prepara- 
tions. Lieutenant-General Scott, the General-in- 
Chief, was an old man, borne down by the infirmi- 

* "McClellan's Last Service to the Republic" : New York, D. 
Appleton & Co. 



53 

ties of age; andj although, in his prime he had been 
a great captain, he had never in his life com- 
manded such bodies of troops as were now to be 
organized and employed. Most of his military 
ideas were antiquated, and many of them were 
diametrically opposed to those which McClellan 
entertained. McDowell had been defeated at Bull 
Eun, and, if he had not been, he was entirely 
imfitted to be of any real service to the Executive 
as a military counsellor in great military affairs. 
In addition to this, President Lincoln soon found 
that he had two wars on his hands. One was the 
public war against the Southern Confederacy ; the 
other was a war in the interior of his own cabinet. 
He was both the head of the Government and the 
head of a political party. He was most earnestly 
bent on saving the Union. He honestly believed 
that the interests of the country required his re- 
election to the Presidency ; but to accomplish this, 
and to bring the public war to a successful close, 
he considered it necessary to hold his party to- 
gether, and to shape things so as to secure his 
renomination by his party. For the latter object 
he was singularly well fitted. He had great per- 
sonal and political shrewdness, and an almost 
imperturbable temper. It is most interesting, and 
at the same time it borders on the grotesque, to 



54 

see how he baffled those of his own political house- 
hold who were true to themselves and not to him. 
In following this out, we have to note that all this 
cabal and political manoeuvring and personal 
treachery ended at last in separating the two men 
who should have been united to the end, and in 
separating McClellan from the service of the 
country. 

The first duty that devolved on McClellan after 
his arrival in Washington was to establish order 
and discipline, and provide for the safety of the 
city and the government. There was no proper 
police, civil or military. Everything was in con- 
fusion. Soldiers wandered loosely about the 
streets, and the hotels were filled with drunken 
officers. The demoralization of the forces which 
had come in from the disastrous field of Bull Run 
was complete. The troops, such as they were, 
were not posted so as either to preserve order or 
to offer any resistance to the enemy if he should 
decide to make an inroad. To place the city and 
the whole territorial division under military gov- 
ernment was the first thing to be done. In a 
little more than a week, by passing long days in 
the saddle and the nights in his office, inspecting, 
organizing, and posting ♦the troops, and reducing 
them to something like discipline, McClellan was 



55 

a^ble, on the 4tli of August, to write to a member 
of his family : " I have Washington perfectly quiet 
now ; you would not know that there was a regi- 
ment here. I have restored order very completely 
already." Yet, all the while, he was not supreme 
and unhampered, but was often thwarted by the 
Lieut enant-General. Nevertheless, he carried out 
his own ideas against all obstacles. 

Simultaneously with this work he had to provide 
for the defences of the city. Any one who exam- 
ines a good map of Washington and the surroimd- 
ing country will see why it was necessary, and 
how necessary it was, that the city should be forti- 
fied immediately. 

" 'Not only was it necessary," says McClellan, " to organ- 
ize, discipline, and drill the troops, but the immense labor 
■of constructing the fortifications required to secure the city 
in the absence of the army was also to be performed by the 
troops. Not only did this consume much time, and greatly 
retard the preparation of the army for the field, but it tied 
down the troops to the line of the defences, and rendered it 
impossible to take up a more advanced position until the 
works were finished. 

" Before my arrival, no "one had contemplated the com- 
plete fortification of the city. I at once conceived the idea, 
and carried it into effect ; for I saw immediately that the 
safety of the capital would always be a great clog on the 
movements of the army, unless its security were amply 
guaranteed by strong intrenchments. I cannot speak in 



56 

too high terms of the cheerfulness, zeal, and activity with 
which these raw troops performed this arduous and dis- 
a,greeable labor. They gave thus early an earnest of what 
might be expected from them under more trying circum- 
stances. 

" The system adopted was that of detached earthworks. 
The most important points were occupied by large bastioned 
forts closed at the gorge, with magazines, platforms, etc. ; 
the scarps and counterscarps often reveted with timber, the 
parapets usually sodded. The intermediate points were 
occupied by lunettes, redoubts, batteries, etc., and in a few 
cases these were united by infantry parapets. The entire 
circumference of the city was thus protected. Towards- 
Manassas the very important advanced points of Upton's 
and Munson's Hills were held by strong works, with some 
small batteries near by. This was the key to the approach 
in that direction." 

In this work of establisliing order and discipline, 
and fortifying the city, there was enough, and more 
than enough, to occupy the brain, the knowledge, 
and the authority of a first-rate commander. But 
now you have to observe that this General was at 
the very same time occupied in beginning and car- 
rying forward the organization of that indispensable 
engine, an army. When McClellan undertook this 
work the United States had only a very small regu- 
lar army, fit only for a peace establishment. All 
the other forces consisted of the new levies of 
volunteers that had come in before, or that were 



57 

coming in after tlie affair at Bull Run. But these 
raw levies were in no proper sense an army. What 
was required was the creation of that vast machine 
"which can move with irresistible force over all 
obstructions until met by another machine of like 
construction and greater power^ or which is handled 
with greater skill.' ' ^ Such a machine the instructed 
soldiers of the South were then preparing. The 
Army of the Potomac, the best, the most complete, 
the first army that the United States ever had on 
so large a scale, was created by McClellan and made 
ready for a forward movement in the course of 
eight months from the time of his arrival in Wash- 
ington. 

The regular army then numbered only 12,984 
men and officers, divided into two regiments of 
dragoons, two of cavalry, one of mounted rifles, four 
of artillery, and ten of infantry. Only a very small 
portion of these regulars, of all arms, were available 
to McClellan in organizing the Army of the Poto- 
mac. He has said that, " no one cognizant of the 
circumstances, and possessed of any knowledge of 
military affairs, can honestly believe that I bestowed 
unnecessary time and labor upon the organization 
and instruction of that army whose courage, disci- 
pline, and efficiency finally brought the war to a 

* Prime, editor of " McClellan' s Own Story." 



58 

close." For my part I think it is quite time the 
carping about his delays and unnecessary consump- 
tion of time should cease. It was never anything 
but a captious and foolish complaint from the 
beginning, and any man ought at this day to be 
ashamed to repeat it. 

"When he commenced the herculean task of creat- 
ing an army, he was, as you have seen, only the 
commanding general of the Territorial Division of 
the Potomac. General Scott, his superior officer, 
differed from him constantly on points vital to his 
system of organization, and McClellan was com- 
pelled to, and did in the main, carry his points 
against the old General's opposition. But at length, 
on the 1st of November, General Scott, at his own 
request, was placed on the retired list, and with his 
advice, and the concurrence of the entire cabinet, 
the President designated McClellan to command all 
the armies of the United States, with the exception 
only of General Wool's command, which then 
embraced Fortress Monroe and the adjacent coun- 
try. McClellan was ordered to confer with the 
President so far as might be necessary. This 
enlarged sphere of his duties made it necessary for 
him not .only to complete the organization of the 
Army of the Potomac, but to assume the direction 
of the whole war throughout the Southern States, 



59 

subject to the President's approval of his plans. At 
the time when he came into this new position, the 
cabinet consisted of Mr. Seward, Secretary of State ; 
Mr. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury; Mr. Cameron, 
Secretary of War ; Mr. Gideon Welles, Secretary of 
the Navy ; Mr. Montgomery Blair, Postmaster- 
General, and Mr. Bates, Attorney-General. The 
elevation of McClellan to the chief command under 
the President was hailed by the whole North with 
the greatest satisfaction ; no serious difficulty had 
occurred between him and any member of the cabi- 
net ; the President gave him his full confidence, 
and for a good while consulted him about every- 
thing; the people of the North were not impatient. 
But as soon as the public began to see that McClel- 
lan was a person of great importance and one whose 
success in the war would make him all-powerful, 
the politicians and the radical leaders in Washing- 
ton began to bestir themselves. They had learned, 
soon after he came to Washington, that they could 
not make a party tool of him, and that he would 
not attach himself to the political fortunes of any 
of the aspirants for the next Presidency. He was 
busy in organizing an army, with the prescience 
and accomplishments of a great soldier, and he had 
no time or taste for political affairs. Congress had, 
a few days before he reached Washington, declared 



60 

that the sole object of the war was the preservation 
of the Union and the prevention of the secession of 
the Southern States. This was not only McClel- 
lan's personal opinion about the proper object of 
the war, but he was bound to consider himself 
officially instructed by the Resolution of Congress 
to so regard it. It was, too, Mr. Lincoln's personal 
opinion, and as President he was equally bound to 
carry out this view of the object of the war. But 
the radical leaders and politicians determined on 
two things ; that the war should be made a war for 
the extermination of slavery, and that McClellan 
should not be permitted to succeed in bringing the 
war to a close. To accomplish these ends their first 
step was to sow the seeds of distrust of McClellan 
in Mr. Lincoln's mind. Their next step was to 
bring Mr. Stanton into the Cabinet as Secretary of 
War, in place of Mr. Cameron. For this purpose 
a secret intrigue was set on foot in the early part 
of January, 1862. Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward 
were adroitly made to believe that Mr. Cameron 
wished to retire, and would accept the mission to 
Eussia ; and also that General McClellan specially 
desired to have Mr. Stanton made Secretary of War. 
If the first was true^ which is more than doubtful, 
the last was not true. But the intrigue was entirely 
successful. Mr. Stanton became Secretary of War. 



61 

Mr. Lincoln was mistaken in believing that Mr. 
Stanton was a man who wonld make a great 
administrative official and a wise war minister. Mr. 
Stanton's energy was spasmodic, due chiefly to an 
imperious temper; he had very little knowledge of 
constitutional law, and his judgment in military 
a:ffairs was good for nothing. Pecuniarily, he was 
not a corrupt or corruptible man ; but he permitted 
the worst of harpies to prey upon the Treasury, 
through the expenditures of the War Office, and he 
made the cost of the war in blood and treasure 
more than threefold what it needed to have been. 
In taking him into his Cabinet, Mr. Lincoln took a 
man who was secretly in league with the radical 
wing of his party, and who was already determined 
to destroy the General in whom the President 
trusted. Yet Mr. Lincoln did it in the honest be- 
lief that he was serving General McClellan, as well 
as the country and himself. 

I have already said that if you note the dates, 
you cannot impute Mr. Stanton's change towards 
McClellan to any change in his opinion and belief 
concerning McClellan' s fitness for the position in 
which he stood. It was simply rank treachery 
and dissimulation. Mr. Stanton became Secretary 
of War early in January, 1862, before the army 
was in a fit condition to make a forward move- 



62 

ment. At that time McClellan was laboriously 
engaged in completing the organization of the 
army, and in making his plans for the prosecution 
of the war. Mr. Stanton knew perfectly well that 
there was no ground for dissatisfaction with the 
General, and that the President felt none. Now 
hear what McClellan says in^ his memoirs, where 
he speaks of a former private effort of Mr. Stan- 
ton to make him, McClellan, arrest Mr. Cameron, 
the Secretary of War, for having made an aboli- 
tion speech to a newly arrived regiment, which 
Mr. Stanton said was an incitement to insubordi- 
nation. This crazy proposal was quite characteris- 
tic of Mr. Stanton, but of course it produced no 
impression on the General. This is what McClel- 
lan says : 

" I liad no idea wlio might be selected in Mr. Cameron's 
place ; and, as lie supported me in purely military matters, I 
objected to his removal and saved him. He was made aware 
of this at the time. 

" Finally, one day when I returned to my house from my 
day's work and was di^essing for dinner, a lady of my fam- 
ily told me that Colonel Key, one of my aides, had just been 
there to inform me that Mr. Cameron had resigned and that 
Mr. Stanton was appointed in his place. This was the first 
intimation that 1 had of the-matter. Before I had finished 
my toilet Mr. Stanton's card came up, and as soon as possi- 
ble I went down to see him. He told me that he had been 



63 

appointed Secretary of War, and that his name had been 
sent to the Senate for confirmation, and that he had called 
to confer with me as to his acceptance. He said that ac- 
ceptance would involve very great personal sacrifices on his 
part, and that the only possible inducement would be that 
he might have it in his power to aid me in the work of put- 
ting down the rebellion ; that he was willing to devote all 
his time, intellect, and energy to my assistance, and that 
together we could soon bring the war to an end. If I 
wished him to accept he would do so, but only on my ac- 
count ; that he had come to know my wishes and determine 
accordingly. I told him that I hoped he would accept the 
position. 

"Soon after Mr. Stanton became Secretary of War it 
became clear that, without any reason known to me, our 
relations had completely changed. Instead of using his 
new position to assist me, he threw every obstacle in my 
way, and did all in his power to create difficulty and distrust 
between the President and myself. I soon found it impos- 
sible to gain access to him. Before he was in office, he 
constantly ran after me, and professed the most ardent 
friendship ; as soon as he became Secretary of War, his 
whole manner changed, and I could no longer find the op- 
portunity to transact even the ordinary current business of 
the office with him. It is now very clear to me that, far 
from being, as he had always represented himself to me, 
in direct and violent opposition to the radicals, he was 
really in secret alliance with them, and that he and they 
were alike unwilling that I should be successful. No other 
theory can possibly account for his and their course, and 
on that theory everything becomes clear and easily ex- 
plained." 



64 

I have not time to detail how McClellaiij from 
the time of Mr. Stanton's entry into the Cabinet, 
was hampered and obstructed. Let one specimen 
suffice. He was sent for to a Cabinet meet- 
ing when other persons were present, and the 
Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Chase, backed 
by Mr. Stanton, endeavored to force him to dis- 
close his plan of operations against the enemy; 
McClellan met this by saying that if he were to 
disclose his plans at that meeting they would 
become known to the enemy in twenty-four hours, 
because Washington was full of spies ; yet, if the 
President would order him to state his plans, he 
must obey. Mr. Lincoln shrank from assuming 
such a responsibility, and then Mr. Seward broke 
up the meeting, remarking contemptuously that 
they didn't seem likely to get much out of the 
General, turned on his heel as he buttoned up his 
coat, and left the room. There were just two men 
in that Cabinet who perfectly understood the folly 
and danger of extorting from the General-in- 
Chief a statement of his military purposes, with 
the enemy strongly intrenched within thirty miles 
of Washington, and with treacherous inmates in 
almost every household in the city. These gen- 
tlemen were Mr. Seward and Mr. Montgomery 
Blair. 



65 

I pass on to the time when McClellan was ready 
for a forward movement of the army into Vir- 
ginia. This was in March, 1862. By that time 
the Southern Confederacy was composed of ten 
States, comprehending more than eight millions of 
inhabitants. The colored race remained submis- 
sive, and although they were not used as fighting 
men, their labor was for a long time a safe basis 
on which to rely for the production of the great 
staples of those States. The Confederate Govern- 
ment, well organized, was seated at Richmond. 
The Confederate troops, under skilful leaders, 
were strongly intrenched at Manassas and at 
Yorktown. That historic town, situated on the 
Virginia side of the York River, just above the 
point where it begins to widen out into Chesa- 
peake Bay, was strongly fortified. It was there 
that McClellan expected and determined to fight 
the first great battle of the war. It was there 
that the Confederates, as soon as he should move 
in that direction, would have to concentrate their 
main strength, and to pu.t forth all their power of 
resistance. Now was manifest, to all minds 
capable of sound military judgment, the wisdom 
of McClellan' s purpose in embarking his army by 
water and transferring it upon the Peninsula, so 
as to turn Yorktown, crush the enemy there, and 



66 

tlien advance upon Riclimond. He had left 
Washington well surrounded by f ortificationS; 'and 
had left sufQ.cient troops, if properly handled, to 
secure its safety. 

It was a reasonable and a sound calculation that 
the enemy could not advance upon Washington 
from Manassas, so as to put it in serious danger, if 
those who were charged with its defence should be 
competent to their work, for the enemy would 
have all that he could do at Yorktown, and else- 
where on the Peninsula. But in order to carry 
out this plan of operations, and force the Confed- 
erates to a decisive battle between the York and 
the James Eivers, it was, of course, necessary that 
every part of McClellan's plan should be carried 
out, just as he had made it. I shall not discuss 
the difference of views in regard to the best line 
of movement which occurred between the Presi- 
dent and some of his advisers and McClellan 
before the army was moved, because McClellan's 
plan was the one that was at length sanctioned by 
the President, and because, when it had been sanc- 
tioned, everything should have been done accord- 
ing to the judgment of the General who was to 
conduct the campaigm and to be responsible for it. 
For I hold it to be a position which history should 
not fail to assert, that a Government, composed of 



67 

mere civilians^ assisted by no military adviser 
whose opinion was to be compared to that of the 
General charged with a great campaign^ was 
bound by every consideration of prudence and 
wisdom to leave that General to exercise his own 
judgment, and to supply him with every possible 
means of success. The reverse of this was just 
what was done ; and I shall now, therefore, un- 
hesitatingly state the conclusion which any honest 
historian must draw. It is that while President 
Lincoln was most anxious for McClellan's suc- 
cess and for the quickest possible termination 
of the war, he was surrounded and controlled 
by a cabal who were determined that McClellan 
should not succeed, and that the war should 
not be ended during that summer. The proof 
of this is direct and conclusive. It is not mere- 
ly a conclusion from circumstantial evidence. It 
is as demonstrable as any proposition that has 
ever, in any history of a great war, arisen for 
determination. The evidence that substantiates 
it extends through a period of just six months, 
and a large part of it consists in the known 
conduct of individuals, and in a series of facts 
which all converge into one conclusion, and 
end in the final consummation of the intended 
purpose. 



68 

I shall group this evidence under the following 
heads : Premising that everything that the Presi- 
dent did or failed to do, that was contrary to Mc- 
Clellan's just expectations^ and the necessities of 
the casC;, was done or omitted by him reluctantly, 
and because he was either misled or mistaken. 
He was so surrounded by malevolent influences 
that he could not help doing wrong. 

1st. When McClellan left Washington to lead 
his army upon the Peninsula, he was General-in- 
Chief, and had been for five months. All his 
plans in reference to Eichmond were connected 
with his plans for the prosecution of the war 
throughout the South and South-west, and if the 
latter were to be withdrawn from his control, they 
should have been placed imder the control of the 
ablest General within the reach of the Govern- 
ment. Instead of this, on the 11th of March, 
when McClellan was at Fairfax Court House, an 
Executive Order was issued relieving him from all 
command excepting that of the Department of the 
Potomac ; constituting the Department of the 
Mississippi, and making General Halleck its com- 
mander, and constituting the country west of the 
Department of the Potomac and east of the De- 
partment of the Mississippi as the Mountain 
Department, and appointing to it General Pre- 



69 

mont. The order appointed no one General-ia- 
Chief over all tlie armies^ and consequently the 
military operations were left under the control of 
the Secretary of War, a mere civilian, without any 
military experience, and at this time an active 
enemy of McClellan. This was one of the steps 
taken to tie McClellan' s hands, in order to secure 
the failure of his coming campaign in Virginia. 
It broke that unity of action which it was his pur- 
pose to enforce in the operations of the different 
armies in the field, and it consequently changed 
the conditions of the campaign in Virginia. 

2d. On the 3d of April, ten days after McClellan 
left Washington, Mr. Stanton issued a General 
Order closing all the recruiting depots for volun- 
teers throughout the country, and stopping all 
recruiting. If he was ignorant of the fact that an 
army in the field must inevitably meet with losses 
under the most favorable circumstances, and that 
to stop all supplies of men at such a juncture is an 
unpardonable folly, he was unfit for his place. If 
he did know this, he committed a crime for which, 
under some governments, he would have been 
called to account, and might have had to answer 
with his head. History must choose between the 
alternatives of ignorance and blindness on one hand, 
and knowledge, with malice and treachery, on the 



70 

other. It is difficult to conceive how the President 
was led into this f oily, if he was consulted before the 
order was issued. It said; in substance, to McClel- 
lan: No matter what may be the force of the 
enemy, no matter what losses you may meet with 
in battle or by disease, not another man shall be 
given you more than those you now have. Imagine 
that a similar order had been issued when General 
Grant, three years afterward, was "fighting it out 
on that line all summer," and that instead of being 
supplied with an endless succession of fresh troops, 
arriving as fast as the head of his columns was cut 
oE by the enemy, he had been told : Fight it out 
with what you have, not another man shall come 
to you. Can you imagine that he would ever have 
forced Lee to surrender ? 

3d. Before McClellan left W^ashington, he was 
assured — I use the word in its strongest meaning 
— 1st. That he should have Blencker's German 
Division, consisting of about 10,000 men; 2d. That 
the first army corps, headed by McDowell, should 
constitute part of his army and be under his com- 
mand; 3d. That he might draw 10,000 men from 
General Wool's command at Fortress Monroe. * He 
reached that post on the 2d of April, fully believing 
and authorized to believe that he would have an 



71 

active army of 156,000; tlie full control of liis base 
of operations, and efficient support from the navy. 
On tlie 3d he received a telegram from the Adjutant- 
General, stating that, by the President's order, he 
was deprived of all control over General Wool and 
the troops of his command, and forbidden to detach 
any of them without General Wool's sanction. On 
the 4th of April, another order reached him, which 
detached McDowell's corps from the force under his 
immediate command, and placed McDowell under 
the direction of the Secretary of War. When this 
astonishing order came to McClellan, the leading 
division of several of his columns was under a hot 
artillery fire, and the skirmishers of the third 
corps were engaged in fighting. The General heard 
of the withdrawal of Blencker's Division on the 
31st of March, by the note of apology which the 
President sent to him just as he was embarking for 
the Peninsula. In conversation on that same day, 
the President assured him that no other troops 
should be withdrawn from his command. These 
three several reductions of his force left him, in- 
stead of an army of 156,000 men under his imme- 
dicite command, with only 85,000, for operations on 
the Peninsula ; and instead of the control of all the 
forces, supplies and operations from the Atlantic to 
the AUeghanies, and from the line of North Caro- 



lina to New York, he was reduced to a strip of 
ground bounded on the west by the railroad from 
Fredericksburg to Richmond, on the south by the 
James, from Richmond to the mouth of the Appo- 
mattox, on the east by a curved line from the 
mouth of Appomattox to the Chickahominy ; thence 
to the White House on the Pamunkey; thence 
through King and Queen Court House to a point on 
the Rappahannock, about two miles above Urbana, 
and thence to the mouth of the Potomac, the 
northern boundary being the Potomac from the 
mouth of Acquia Creek downward. His bases of 
operation at Washington and Fortress Monroe 
were both removed from his command, and he was 
left simply with his 85,000 men and without con- 
trol of the groimd until he passed beyond White 
House. Had he not, then, after all that had trans- 
pired, only too good reason to believe that the 
Secretary of War was inimical to him, and did not 
desire his success ? If it was necessary, or was be- 
lieved to be necessary, to displace McClellan from 
the control of all the operations throughout the 
seceded States, why was not some other General 
substituted in his place ? Why did the Secretary 
of War retain in his own hands the power not only 
to direct what was to be done on the whole theatre 
of the war, but the power to control McClellan in 



73 

the sphere to which he was now reduced, without 
the Secretary's being guided by the judgment of 
any military man as General-in-Chief ? You must 
look for the answer in the accumulating proof of a 
settled purpose to prevent McClellan's success. This 
state of affairs continued down to the middle of 
July, and through the whole of that three months 
the evidence of Stanton's hostility to McClellan, 
and of his duplicity, is accumulating until he makes 
Halleck General-in-Chief, and thus secures an ally 
in his warfare on McClellan — an ally whom he 
could make do anything that he pleased. General 
Halleck was a man of very little force of character, 
and with only a theoretical knowledge of the art of 
war. Stanton was a man of indomitable force of 
will, and, although he had no military knowledge 
whatever, he had an unbounded self-confidence. 

4th. It is in proof, that Mr. Stanton, and Mr. 
Chase, at a later period, when Washington was in 
imminent peril after the second Bull Run, would 
have preferred to see the capital fall into the hands 
of the enemy rather than have it saved by Mc- 
Clellan ; and nothing but Mr. Lincoln's firmness 
and his confidence in McClellan's ability to save it, 
seconded by McClellan's prompt acceptance of the 
command, stood between the capture of the city 



74 

and the flight of tlie Government on the one hand, 
and the repulse of the enemy on the other.* But 
to return to Yorktown. 

5th. McClellan's origmal plan of storming York- 
town was one of the most admirable pieces of 
strategy that is recorded anywhere in military 
history • and yet, like all really great strategical 
operations, it was simple, because it was based up- 
on obvious considerations. But its success de- 
pended, of course, upon an unchanged situation of 
the General and his army. It comprehended first 
the movement of McDowell's corps as an attack- 
ing force above the town ; second, the ascent of the 
York River by the gun-boats then in the lower 
Chesapeake, until they should pass the heavy bat- 
teries of the enemy on the water side of the town, 
and then take up a position from which they could 
throw their shells across the isthmus upon the re- 
tiring troops of the Confederates ; third, upon a 
simultaneous attack by McClellan in person upon 
the strong lines of defence south of the town, 
which stretched across the Peninsula, and which 
were regarded by McClellan and his best officers 
as the most formidable line of works that were 
ever erected for defensive purposes. But the with- 

* See note at the end of this Address. 



to 



drawal of the First Corps from McClellan's com- 
mand, the refusal of the naval commander to risk 
his vessels against the fire from the batteries on 
the water side of the town, the diminution of Mc- 
Clellan's active forces by the withdrawal of Blenck- 
er's division, and the taking of Fortress Monroe 
out of his command, destroyed the whole plan. 
Instead of storming Yorktown, McClellan now 
had to invest it by a regular siege. In one month 
he went over it, drove the Confederate forces out 
of it, pursued them in their retreat, and prepared 
to advance on Eichmond. All the while the 
presses of the North, stimulated by his enemies in 
"Washington, resounded with an outcry against his 
slowness, and the people could not or would not 
see how he had been crippled. Having been so 
crippled, he might have asked to be relieved ; but 
you must remember that from the time when he 
landed on the Peninsula down to the finding of a 
new base on the James, at Harrison's Landing, he 
and his army were almost constantly under fire ; 
his troops were devoted to him beyond all parallel 
in our military history, or in any history since that 
of the first Napoleon. He had created that splen- 
did army. To ask to be relieved under such cir- 
cumstances was out of the question. He knew 
now what an enemy he had left behind him in 



76 

Wasliington ; but he loved his country, and he 
could not see — nor could any man see — who 
was fit to succeed him in the command of that 
army which the people expected would take Eich- 
mond, but which the radical leaders in "Washington 
had determined should not be taken then. In that 
high order of military men to which McClellan 
belonged, it was no uncommon thing to subordi- 
nate all love of self to the public interest, and to 
accept or remain in the most unpleasant and pain- 
ful situations from a sense of duty. Meade was 
such a man ; and so, I am persuaded, was blunt 
old Hooker, although he was not equal to the 
command that was put upon him later, and which 
he certainly does not appear to have sought. 

I shall not on this occasion enter upon a detailed 
description of McClellan' s operations by which he 
expected to take Richmond after having driven 
the Confederates out of Yorktown. Every one is 
aware that his success depended first upon the 
advance of McDowell's Corps to a position where 
he would form a junction with McClellan' s right 
wing, and be placed under McClellan' s command ; 
second, upon McClellan' s being supplied with all 
the re-enforcements which he required that were 
within the reach of the Government, and as fast 
as he called for them. In both respects he was 



77 

baffled by the conduct of the authorities in "Wash- 
ington, and it is now certain that in both respects 
he was so baffled not because the President but 
because the radical leaders in the President's party 
did not mean that McClellan should end the war. 
You should examine the evidence by observing that 
he was ordered to extend his right wing to a con- 
siderable distance to the north so as to effect the 
junction with McDowell ; and that the main body 
of his own army rested on or near the Chicka- 
hominy River. McDowell's forward movement 
was arrested by orders from Washington, and he 
never was placed under McClellan's command. 
"It was/' says McClellan, "rendered impossible 
for the enemy to communicate by rail with Fred- 
ericksburg, or with Jackson via Gordonsville, ex- 
cept by the very circuitous route of Lynchburg, 
and the road was left entirely open for the ad- 
vance of McDowell had he been permitted to join 
the Army of the Potomac. His withdrawal 
towards Front Eoyal was, in my judgment, a 
serious and fatal error; he could do no good in 
that direction, while, had he been permitted to 
carry out the orders of May 17, the united forces 
would have driven the enemy within the imme- 
diate entrenchments of Richmond before Jackson 
could have returned to its succor, and probably 



78 

would have gained possession promptly of that 
place. 

" It is very clear that the arrangements I directed 
in March and on the 1st of April for the defence 
of Washington and the Shenandoah wonld have 
proved ample to check Jackson without delaying 
the advance of McDowell. The total disregard of 
these instructions led to the actual condition of 
affairs. 

"On the 25th of May^ McDowell's advance was 
eight miles beyond Fredericksburg. If he had 
marched on the 26th, as first ordered, he would 
have found no enemy in his front until he reached 
the South Anna, on the 27th or early on the 28th. 
For his telegram of the 25th shows that they had 
hastily fallen back during the night of the 24th 
and 25th, and Porter found them at Hanover 
Court House and Ashland on the 27th ; so that, 
as things were. Porter's division alone would have 
insured McDowell's junction with the Army of the 
Potomac without the slightest difficulty." 

The 26th of June was the day which McClellan 
had fixed for his final advance on Richmond. 
McDowell was not permitted to join him, and the 
re-enforcements which he had repeatedly and ear- 
nestly called for had been withheld. The enemy, 
in greatly superior force, took advantage of his 



79 

situation, and attacked Hm on his right. He was 
thns compelled to tnrn his attention to the protec- 
tion of his communications and depots of supply. 
"This," he says in his report, "was a bitter con- 
firmation of the military judgment which had been 
reiterated to my military superiors from the incep- 
tion and through the progress of the Peninsular 
campaign." Then followed the seven days, 
through which he fought his way for a change of 
base to the James River, in a series of desperate 
conflicts, in every one of which the Confederates 
were baffled, until, on the night of the 3d of July, 
the last of the wagon-trains reached the new base 
at Harrison's Landing, and the wearied Army of 
the Potomac, which had battled with such heroic 
endurance under his skilful guidance, rested in 
security, protected by their own batteries and the 
gun-boats which lay in the river. The three fol- 
lowing days were occupied by McClellan in 
strengthening and guarding his position, and in a 
fruitless telegraphic correspondence with the Presi- 
dent, to convince the latter that re-enforcements 
ought to be sent to him, so that he could advance 
on Richmond from the James. 

As a military question, the whole matter was 
perfectly plain. It was simply whether by allow- 
ing McClellan to advance on Richmond from the 



80 

James the enemy should be confined to the defence 
of his capital^ or whether by withdrawing McClel- 
lan's army from the James, and then withdrawing 
its command from him, the enemy should be invited 
to advance on Washington and fight a great battle 
in front of that city, which would, in all proba- 
bility, fall into his hands if the Federal forces 
should be defeated. Although there was no room 
for rational doubt which of these alternatives 
should be adopted, it was determined that the 
Army of the Potomac should be withdrawn to the 
front of the Federal capital ; and this withdrawal, 
against McClellan's earnest remonstrance, was so 
determined and so managed by the Secretary of 
War and General Halleck, the General-in-Chief, 
that after McClellan's army had been transferred 
to the neighborhood of the city, its forces were 
withdrawn from his command and placed under 
the command of General Pope, along with the 
forces called the Army of Virginia ; leaving 
McClellan in his tent at Alexandria, with a body- 
guard of a few wounded men, as a spectacle of a 
disgraced man, to be looked at and jeered at. by 
the nation. 

You have all heard or read of the second Bull 
Run, where the rout and overthrow of the Federal 
forces were complete, and you know that on that 



81 

field McClellan was not permitted to lead even a 
regiment, although he begged to be at least al- 
lowed to be present and thus to stimulate and 
encourage the troops who adored him. 

But in a few short and disastrous hours all eyes 
were turned towards him. The hounds of the 
press ceased their barking and shut their mouths ; 
the nation held its breath, asking, and trembling 
as it asked, " Where is McClellan ? " The soldiers, 
stung by defeat, as they poured on towards the cap- 
ital, asked " Where is Little Mac ? Why has he been 
taken from us ? What is to be done now ? " The 
melancholy and disgraceful day of the second Bull 
Run was the 1st of September ; the night of that 
day saw 50,000 stragglers on the roads leading 
into Washington ; the afternoon of the next day 
saw General Pope and General McDowell riding 
together in the middle of a regiment of cavalry in 
full retreat, and the victorious Confederates were 
pressing on their rear guard. Where was McClel- 
lan ? 

At half -past seven o'clock in the morning of 
the 2d, the door-bell of his house in Washington 
was rimg by a gentleman whose nerves were 
strung to their utmost tension. It was President 
Lincoln, accompanied by General Halleck. They 
were ushered into the parlor. Never was there 



82 

such a situation. The President had come to 
learn of what fibre was made the patriotism of the 
General who had been so treated. Mr. Lincoln 
may have had reasons of his own for compunction 
and regret ; but he was a man equal to the pain- 
ful duty which he had come to discharge. It was 
to ask McClellan to save the capital and the na- 
tion. The President was deeply moved ; he knew 
the whole peril, and he knew the man to whom he 
had to appeal. "Will you," he asked, " dare you, 
take the command under these circumstances ? 
The risk is very great — we may all have to fly — 
the probability is that Washington cannot be 
saved." " I stake my head on its safety," replied 
McClellan, "and will do whatever you bid me." 
He asked for no written orders — he stipulated 
for nothing for himself — he did not even think, as 
he might, and perhaps should, have thought, of 
providing, in self-defence, that some part of this 
immense responsibility should be borne by some 
one else. There was no one else that could have 
borne a feather's weight of it. 

I cannot follow him through that day and the 
succeeding night ; I cannot now describe to you 
how instantly everything was changed as soon as 
the troops knew that he was again to command 
them ; how he posted them as they came in ; how 



83 

in twenty-four hours lie secured the safety of the 
city, and how the enemy , learning that he was 
again in command, turned northward and directed 
his march to the upper waters of the Potomac. 
There he was followed by McClellan, with a celerity 
of movement that is simply wonderful, consider- 
ing that he had to reconstruct and refit many of 
the organizations of a lately defeated army. 

McClellan's movements northward had to be 
made carefully so as not to uncover Washington 
before the enemy's position and plans were de- 
veloped, but he was constantly impeded by 
General Halleck's cautions not to be too precip- 
itate. On the 10th of September he learned from 
his scouts that Lee's army was probably in the 
vicinity of Frederick. On the 13th an order 
issued by General Lee on the 9th fell into Mc- 
Clellan's hands. It revealed the whole of Lee's 
plans. On the 14th the battle of South Mountain 
occurred, in which the Confederates were defeated, 
with a great loss in killed and wounded, and 1500 
prisoners were taken. The aggregate Federal loss 
was 1568. McClellan pressed forward his army 
in pursuit of the enemy, and on the 17th, fifteen 
days after he had resumed the command of the 
Army of the Potomac, the long and desperately 
contested battle of Antietam ended in the defeat 



84. 

of the Confederates. On the next night the Con- 
federate Army recrossed the Potomac into Virginia, 
leaving 2700 of their dead unburied on the field. 
13 guns j 39 colors; upward of 15,000 stand of 
small arms, and more than 6000 prisoners, were 
captured by the Federals in the three battles of 
South Mountain, Crampton's Gap, and Antietam, 
without losing a single gun or a single color: 
The grand aggregate of the Federal killed, 
wounded, and missing in the battle of Antietam 
was 12,469. The total number of the Federal 
forces was 87,164 men. The forces of the enemy 
were a good deal larger. 

The battle of Antietam was not only one of the 
great historic battles of the war, but the repulse 
of Lee across the Potomac secured Washington a 
second time. If Lee had triumphed over Mc- 
Clellan in that battle, he could have marched as he 
pleased on Washington ; and there is no reason to 
suppose that those who were in charge of its de- 
fence could have prevented its capture. Nowhere 
east of the Alleghanies was there another organ- 
ized force that could have arrested Lee's march 
through an undevastated country, levying tribute 
as he went along from populous and wealthy 
cities. ] 

On the 1st of October, President Lincoln came 



85 

to McClellan's headquarters^ near the field of 
Antietani; and remained there three days. He 
rode over the field, and made himself fully ac- 
quainted with the details of the battle and the 
condition of the army. He told McClellan that he 
had formerly believed that he was too slow, but 
that he now saw his mistake, that he was the only 
general in the service who could handle a large 
army, that he had his absolute and entire confi- 
dence, that he must go on and do what he thought 
right, move when he was ready and not before, 
and when he moved do as he thought best • that 
he must make his mind easy, that he should not 
be removed from the command, and that he 
should have his full and unqualified support."^ 
He promised that the destitute condition of the 
army should be remedied as quickly as practi- 
cable 3 but that condition was not remedied for 
more than three weeks after the President's return 
to Washington, so that the army could have been 
safely marched upon a new and aggressive cam- 
paign in the enemy's country any earlier than it 

* I have made this statement just as it was given to me by Gen- 
eral McClellan himself in 1880, shortly before I published it in an 
article in the North American Beview. I read it to him before it 
was printed, and he confirmed it. Compare *' McClellan's Own Story," 
pp. 627-628, and "McClellan's Last Service to the Republic," by the 
author of this address, New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1885. 



86 

was. But; although, the President returned to 
Washington from the field of Antietam as firm 
in his support of McClellan as it was in his 
nature to be in regard to anything, McClellan' s 
enemies in the Cabinet began to work anew. Con- 
cealment; misrepresentation, and falsehood were 
all resorted to to get up the pretext for disputing 
McClellan' s repeated assertions that his army 
needed indispensable supplies, but subsequent reve- 
lations show that his assertions were absolutely 
true. He crossed the Potomac in pursuit of the 
Confederates on the 28th of ^October. Six days 
sufficed for the march of 50 miles from the Poto- 
mac to Warrenton after the last corps of the army 
had crossed ; notwithsta.nding that heavy rains 
delayed the movement considerably in the begin- 
ning, and three of the corps had to wait at least 
one day at the crossing to complete their necessary 
supplies. At the end of the six days McClellan 
had made the different dispositions of his troops 
which his plans for advancing against the enemy 
contemplated. His headquarters were at Rector- 
town on the Gth of November. Just previous to 
this, some one liad informed the radical leaders in 
Washington that if McClellan were allowed to 
figlit another ba^ttle he would in all probability 
demolish the Confederate forces, because those 



87 

forces were so disposed that lie could divide and 
beat them in detail. If he should then and there 
destroy Lee's army, it was supposed that he would 
become a military dictator, so powerful would he 
be in the applause and affections of the people of 
the North. This therefore was not to be allowed. 
A Cabinet meeting was summoned on the 5th 
of November. At that meeting the old story was 
trumped up of unnecessary delay after the battle 
■of Antietam ; false figures imposed on Secretary 
Seward and Mr. Montgomery Blair. They were 
forced to be silent. After the meeting broke up, 
the Secretary of War and General Halleck assisted 
by Mr. Chase, obtained from the President discre- 
tionary authority to displace McClellan, and at the 
last moment, by a haphazard choice, General Burn- 
side was made his successor. A special messenger 
was instantly despatched from the War department 
with the order directing McClellan immediately 
to turn over his command to Major-General Biu-n- 
-side and to repair to Trenton in New Jersey, re- 
porting on his arrival at that place for further 
orders. The messenger, accompanied by General 
Burnside, reached McClellan' s tent at Rectortown 
at a late hour on the night of November 7. As 
soon as he could render all the assistance possible 
to General Burnside in making him understand 



88 

Ms plans for the campaign^ McClellan started for 
Washingtorij where he did not remain an hour. 
He never again saw Lincoln or Stanton or Hal- 
leek. He arrived at Trenton at four o'clock in 
the morning of the 12th. Why was he sent 
there ? He was not then a citizen of New Jersey ; 
he had no connection with the city of Trenton ^ 
there was no military duty for him to perform 
there ; there was not a Federal soldier in the place.. 
He was sent there to disgrace him. The radical 
faction had triumphed ; a new pressure from with- 
out had come upon Mr. Lincoln, in addition to> 
that put upon him in his own cabinet. This was 
the renewed pressure for converting the war intO' 
a war for the extermination of slavery. On the 
13th of September Mr. Lincoln told a deputation 
of clergymen from Chicago that an emancipation, 
proclamation would be no more effective than the 
Pope's bull against the comet ; but nine days 
afterward, after McClellan gained the Battle of 
Antietam, the President issued the proclamation. 

Some of you may perhaps think that it was for- 
tunate upon the whole that the war was not ended 
in the summer of 1862 even by a final and decisive 
victory over the Confederates by whomsoever 
gained, because you may suppose that in that event 
slavery would not have been destroyed. If you 



89 

make no account of the frightful cost of the war in 
blood and treasure consequent upon its prolonga- 
tion after the autumn of 1862, you should still see 
that nothing could have saved slavery but the 
triumph of the Southern Confederacy. It was not 
a question for the people of the North whether there 
should be peace without any action on the subject 
of slavery, unless the Southern States should succeed 
in finally severing the Union into two nations. If 
McClellan could have dictated or advised the terms 
of peace, it is certain that he would have required, 
or advised the Government to require, as one of the 
conditions, a gradual and regulated emancipation, 
education of the negroes, and preparation of them 
for the duties and rights of citizenship. To these 
terms the South would probably have acceded. If 
Lincoln and McClellan had together dictated the 
settlement, they would not have differed, and the 
South must have acquiesced. We should have had 
none of the evils of the subsequent reconstruction 
measures, none of the enormities of sudden and un- 
educated negro suffrage, no violence done to the Con- 
stitution by forcing amendments upon the people of 
the South as a sheer act of power, and ^' carpetbag" 
rule would never have cursed Southern society. 
The control which the radical element of the dom- 
inant party in the North obtained over the conserva- 



90 

tives was a calamity; and one of its worst results 
was tliat it prevented tbe co-operation of Lincoln 
and McClellan, and their joint influence, over the 
welfare of the whole country. After the final de- 
feat and collapse of the Sou.thern Confederacy had 
come, the life of President Lincoln, never so im- 
portant as it was then, was terminated by the bullet 
of an assassin; and his successor was unable to 
control the radical wing of the party as Lincoln 
would have controlled it if McClellan had conquered 
in the summer of 1862. The politicians who finally 
destroyed Lincoln's confidence in McClellan may 
have had reasons which justified them to their own 
consciences, bu.t history must pass upon men's 
reasons and their consciences. If it finds that the 
reasons were pretexts, that the consciences were 
seared by self-seeking, that the objects were gained 
by duplicity and by leading a patriotic ruler like 
Lmcoln to his own and the country's injury, there 
is but one judgment that it can pronounce. Public 
men are not entitled to claim immunity from 
censure by asserting the purity of their motives and 
the wisdom of their acts. Posterity must judge 
both their motives and their acts, and where the 
judgment of history places them they must remain. 
I will now put a question for which this is the 
appropriate time and place, and the answer to which 



91 

farnislies the key to all McClellan's political con- 
duct subsequent to tlie tenuinaiion of his military 
service. Why was it that in answer to overtures 
which were made to him by Mr. Lincoln, McClellan 
did not forego all political opposition and refuse to 
be a candidate for the Presidency in 1864 ? It cer- 
tainly was not that he coveted the office ; it was 
not because he wished again to lead the armies of 
the United States. It was because he believed, and 
his wisest friends believed, that if Mr. Lincoln were 
re-elected, the same causes would be in operation 
and the same means would be used whereby the 
conservative political elements would most probably 
be subordinated to the power of the radical forces ; 
that inasmuch as the latter had never given up 
their determination to rule, they would in all proba- 
bility continue, if not to rule, to hamper and obstruct 
Mr. Lincoln's policy. For this reason McClellan 
accepted the nomination that was forced upon him 
by the Democratic party, and which he did nothing 
whatever to obtain ; and when it appeared that the 
platform promulgated by the convention of that 
party was one on which it was unfit for him to 
stand, Mr. Prime is perfectly right in saying that 
he did a great public service by repudiating 
it. He made for himself a platform on which he 
and his political friends who loved the Union and 



92 

meant that it should be preserved, and that the 
Southern secession should not finally prevail, could 
stand and vote. How many votes he actually re- 
ceived will never be known ; the Secretary of War 
and his coadjutors took care of enough of the 
soldiers' vote, especially here in your great Penn- 
sylvania, to secure his defeat, at least on the returns. 

But how did McClellan bear his defeat ? I had 
ample personal means of knowing, but I will not 
offer my own testimony. I prefer to read the 
following letter which he wrote to his mother when 
the result became known : 

" Orange, Nov. 11, 1864. 

^'M.Y Dear Mother, — Tlie smoke has cleared away and 
"we are beaten. All we can do is to accept it as the will of 
God, and to pray tliat lie will so turn tlie hearts of our rulers 
that they may open a way of salvation for the country to 
emerge from its troubles. Personally I am glad that the 
dreadful responsibility of the government of this nation is 
not to devolve upon my shoulders. My only regret is for 
my country and my friends, so many of whom have suffered 
on account of their devotion to me. It would have been a 
most pleasant thing for me to have had it in my power to 
redress their wrongs ; but that is impossible now, and I can 
repay them only by sincere gratitude. 

"I do not believe that God can have given over our 
country, and although I cannot yet see the daylight, I can- 
not doubt that it will break forth when least expected, and 
I have full confidence that if we deserve to be saved He 
will save us. 



93 

" I sent in my resignation a few days ago and liave not 
yet heard whether it is accepted or not. I shall now remain 
in private life, and I can imagine no combination of circum- 
stances that will draw me into public life again. I feel that 
I have sacrificed as much for my country as any one can 
reasonably expect, unless I could effect some good object 
which no one else could, and I do not flatter myself that that 
can ever be the case. 

" I have not yet determined on my plans, but as soon as 
the excitement has subsided and my resignation is accepted, 
I shall very promptly determine what to do. I am still 
young enough, strong enough, hopeful enough, to begin life 
anew, and have no regrets for the past because I feel that I 
have simply tried to do my duty to the country and to God. 
I never felt less regret for anything in my life than for the 
personal consequences of the late defeat. A great weight is 
removed from my shoulders, and I feel that I am once more 
a free citizen, as good as anybody else. As soon as things 
are quiet and the excitement has subsided, I shall quietly 
run over to Philadelphia for a few days. Have you heard 
from Arthur since his return to the army? I hope and 
trust that you will not let the state of the country worry you 
at all ; it is in the hands of God, and in Him must we trust 
to carry us through. Ever, my dear mother, 

" Your affectionate son, 

" GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN"." 

Just twenty-three years of private life remained 
for McClellan after his military life ended. They 
were years of great happiness and great useful- 
ness. His resources for happiness were inexhaus- 



94 

tible ; his means of usefulness were large and 
varied. Some of the remaining years of his life 
were passed in European travel and in delightful 
intercourse with the most distinguished and most 
worthy persons of the countries that he visited. 
His travels extended into the East ; and never 
was there a man better fitted by accomplishments, 
knowledge, tastes, and aptitude for the benefits 
which foreign travel gives. He spoke many 
languages ; was well read in many literatures -, 
knew many subjects, and was constantly adding 
to his knowledge. He never contracted, however, 
the least of that feeling which makes so many 
Americans prefer a residence abroad ; he always 
returned to his own land lovmg it better and hold- 
ing its institutions in higher estimation. He 
always came home when occupation awaited him 
or when he could make it. He was employed in 
various affairs, and it is, to all who loved and hon- 
ored him, cause for thankfulness that he made 
by honorable labor a moderate but sufiicient pro- 
vision for his own wants and tastes and for those 
who were to come after him. No appeal to public 
or to private bounty is needful for those who were 
dependent on him ; and for this I shall ever feel 
profoundly grateful. 

I need not describe the later years of his life ; 



95 

tlie trusts that he fulfilled ; the positions that he 
held. It is all known to you and it is a noble 
record. When his life comes finally to be written 
it will be acknowledged that, take him for all in 
all; in the sum total of his character, his various 
powers, his intellect, his principles, and his virtues, 
he was as noble a specimen of human nature as 
this age has produced. The fond picture which 
poor Ophelia drew of what her princely lover had 
been, when she supposed that his mind was over- 
thrown, will, in the case of our lost McClellan, 
have to be greatly modified and enlarged. In 
that shadowy kingdom of Denmark, "the soldier's, 
scholar's, courtier's eye, tongue, sword," might 
picture "the glass of fashion and the mould of 
form, the expectancy and rose of the fair state." 
In the busy reality of our modern life, the 
mature and thoroughly equipped soldier, states- 
man, citizen, patriot, and Christian gentleman, the 
man of action, the man of affairs, the man of 
rounded and completed life and ripened wisdom 
and unstained escutcheon, constitutes a character 
to be studied with ever increasing interest, and one 
marked by a fame that we shall not willingly let 
die. 

Of this man it is proposed to erect in the city 
of his birth a suitable memorial that shall tell the 



96 

present and future generations what he was. The 
sympathies of the whole country, I am sure, will be 
with you, and so, I hope, will be their material aid. 
By what ideas and accessories this object is to be 
accomplished so that the monument will speak to 
the beholder as it ought, there are two thoughts 
that it must embody; that he twice saved the 
capital of the nation from falling into the hands 
of those who, if they had spared its buildings, 
would have destroyed its Government, and that 
he created the noblest army that up to that time 
the United States had ever possessed. 

In that elaborate and not wholly inconsistent 
rhapsody of Emanuel Swedenborg in which he has 
described the structure of heaven and the condition 
of its inhabitants, with many of whom he tells us 
he had again and again conversed, we learn that 
there is an inner and celestial kingdom, where, 
from the immediate presence of the Lord, as from 
a central sun, emanate the light and heat of 
Divine Love and Truth; whose warmth and bril- 
liancy penetrate most directly the spirits of those 
who were once men but who have become angels. 
There they are perpetually turned to the everlast- 
ing source of the Divine effulgence, and their 
occupations appear to be the never-ending recep- 
tion of its influence. The Christian soldier of 



97 

whom I have been speaking had a different con- 
ception of the other world j one that would be 
likely to be entertained by a man who had found 
in this life the true meaning of work, when done 
with fidelity to God and to fellow-men. Writing, 
in 1879, in answer to a pleasant note from a very 
early friend about making a voyage to ^^ the land 
where it is always afternoon," he said: "I fancy, 
Sam, that we will never reach that land where it 
is always afternoon, in any ship built by mortal 
hands. Our fate is to work and still to work as 
long as there is any work left in us ; and I do not 
doubt that it is best, for I can't help thinking that 
when we reach that other and far better land we 
shall still have work to do throughout the long 
ages, only we shall then see as we go on that it is 
all done for the Master and under his own eye ; 
and we will like it and never grow weary of it, as 
we often do here when we don't see clearly to 
what end we are working and our work brings us 
in contact with all sorts of men and things not 
pleasant to rub against. I suppose that the more 
we work here the better we shall be trained for 
that other work which after all is the great end 
towards which we move or ought to be moving. 
Well, I did not start out to sermonize, but some- 
how or other your letter started my thoughts in 



98 

that direction. I would like to take ^ tlie belong- 
ings ' and sail for tliat quiet land; but we will 
have to wait some little time yet, and I suppose 
each, one will reach, it alone and the first arrived 
wait for the others." There we may believe that 
he is now, and there all who have done their work 
in this world, whatsoever it may have been, as he 
did his, may expect to find continued employment 
under the Master's eye. 



Note on Secretary Stanton s order of Septeniber 2, 
1862, respecting the contents of the Washington 
Arsenal. 

One can only conjecture how the Confederates 
would have treated Washington if it had fallen 
into their hands. Some of their authorities have 
since said that it was never their policy to seize 
the Federal capital, but only to keep up a per- 
petual menace. If General Lee, however, had 
triumphed at Antietam, he would have had both 
Washington and Baltimore in his power, and prob- 
ably would have felt compelled to take them. It 
is a very significant fact that after Pope's defeat 
at the Second Bull Bun, one of the public estab- 
lishments in Washington — at this mgment the 



99 

most important of all — was in imminent danger 
from the Federal Secretary of War himself. At 
that time General Eipley was Chief of Ordnance ; 
Colonel (afterwards General) George D. Ramsay 
was Commandant of the Washington arsenal. On 
the 2d of September^ Mr. Stanton gave a verbal 
order to General Ripley to ship everything from 
the arsenal forthwith to New York. General Rip- 
ley communicated this order to Colonel Ramsay, 
by whom it would have to be executed. Ramsay 
was an intimate friend of Mr. James C. Welling, 
then one of the editors of the National Intelli- 
genceVy and now widely known as President of 
Columbia University in Washington. He went 
immediately to Welling' s office, told him of the 
order confidentially, said that he should not obey 
it, and that, as he might thereafter be called to 
account for not obeying an order of the Secretary 
of War, he wished that there might be a witness 
of the reasons that governed him. These were 
that to dismantle the arsenal and send away the 
arms and munitions of war at that moment would 
terribly alarm the people of the North, and they 
would conclude that the capital could not be 
saved. Mr. Welling replied that he (Colonel 
Ramsay) was taking a fearful risk, in disobeying 
an order of the Secretary, but that patriotic con- 



100 

siderations required him to take that risk. This 
conversation occurred before Ramsay knew that 
the President had charged General McClellan with 
the defence of the city. Between one and two 
o'clock of that day McClellan sent to Halleck, 
General-in-Chief; the following note : 

September 2 [1862], 1.20 P. M. 
Majoe-General Halleck. 

My Dear Halleck, — The ordnance officer (Lieutenant 
Porter) informs me tliat General Ripley says that lie has 
just received an order from the Secretary of War to ship 
everything from this arsenal to New York. 

I had sent to General Eipley to learn what small arms 
were here, so that I might be prepared to arm stragglers, 
etc. I do not think this order ought to be carried out so 
promptly. I do not despair of saving the capital. Better 
destroy all there is there at the eleventh hour than send 
them off now. Will you not say something as to this ? 
In haste, truly yours, 

Geo. B. McClellai^-. 

I am pushing things through, and shall have everything 
we have in readiness. McC. 

General Halleck answered this note as follows : 

Headquarters of the Army", 

Washington, September 2, 1862. 
Hajor-General McClellan, Washington, D. C. 

General, — At least 50,000 or 60,000 arms will be left, 
and a large number of pieces of artillery. 

H. W, Halleck, General-in-Chief . 

[See volume xii., part iii., War Eecords, pp. 802, 805.] 



101 

From this answer, it is apparent tliat General 
Halleck had not taken, and would not take, any 
steps to have the order countermanded, or to pre- 
vent its being carried out. He simply informs 
McClellan that there will be left fifty or sixty 
thousand arms and some pieces of artillery; all 
the other vast materiel, so far as depended on 
him, would be sent o:ff. 

It would be a matter of some interest to know 
at what precise time on that day Mr. Stanton 
gave this order to General Ripley. The President 
and General Halleck were at McClellan' s house 
at half -past seven o'clock on that morning, and 
McClellan then and there accepted the command, 
which the President begged him to take. It ap- 
pears that there was a stated cabinet meeting on 
that day, and that when Mr. Stanton entered the 
room, before the President came in, he said that 
he had just learned from General Halleck that the 
President had placed McClellan in command of 
the forces in Washington. When the President 
came in and* confirmed this information, there 
w^as a scene, in which Mr. Stanton, as he usually 
became when excited, was insolent to the Presi- 
dent. This is evident from the account given by 
Mr. Chase and Mr. Gideon Welles, as quoted by 
Mr. Prime ("McClellan's Own Story," pp. 544, 



102 

545). Mr. Chase, too, joined in remonstrating 
against the President's action, and Mr. Lincoln 
was so distressed by the opposition of the two 
Secretaries that he said he would gladly resign his 
office. But he did not recede from his position in 
regard to McClellan,- and this, doubtless, made Mr. 
Stanton and Mr. Chase the more angry. If, now,, 
we recollect that this was a regular cabinet day, 
that for a long period of time the stated cabinet 
meetings were held at twelve o'clock, as they 
have since been, and then compare the hour at 
which McClellan dated his note to Halleck, 
informing him that Lieutenant Porter had brought 
information that General Eipley had said he had 
just received the Secretary's order to ship every- 
thing in the arsenal to New York, the inference 
seems to be irresistible that Mr. Stanton gave the 
order to General Eipley after he left the cabinet 
meeting, and gave it in a condition of violent 
anger because McClellan had been put in com- 
mand. Mr. Stanton may have heard of the Presi- 
dent's interview with McClellan at a much earlier 
hour than twelve o'clock, and it is probable that 
he had. But whether he gave the order to Gen- 
eral Ripley before or after the cabinet meeting, 
his hostility to McClellan made the animus of the 
order, in either case, a great deal more than a 



103 

mistaken judgment as to the precautions proper 
to be taken in order to prevent the enemy from 
having the benefit of what the arsenal contained. 
How soon the President heard of this order it is 
perhaps now impossible to ascertain. But he 
knew of it before the following morning ; and 
feeling great anxiety to see for himself what had 
been done, he drove (on the 3d) to the arsenal, 
saw Colonel Ramsay, learned from him that noth- 
ing had been sent away, and thanked him very 
warmly for taking the responsibility of disobeying 
the Secretary of War. Had it not been for Colonel 
Eamsay's course, McClellan must have fought the 
battle of Antietam, if he had ever fought it at all, 
with troops very ill supplied with the necessary 
arms and munitions. 



V 



